The Internet must change.

• Author: Wiesner, Pat
• Position: Column

Can the Internet fail? Perhaps not, but it has a problem that could cause massive revolt among users.

Like a lot of companies we want to continue to grow. We presently publish 10 magazines, and we are always looking for new ideas that we think will help us do so. Now we are working on an idea that we have a lot of high hopes for. It is a dynamite prospective national magazine. Websites are a big thing these days and we have them for all our magazines. Since we are in the research phase of this new effort we naturally wanted to check out the existence of a website. The simplest first try is to type (nameofmag).com and see what you come up with. Well, we did just that (I'm not going to tell the actual name for what will be obvious reasons) and were stunned by what we saw.

I have heard of porn on the Internet, but I had never really seen it before. Here I was, without warning, without asking, without realizing, looking at the most vivid, lurid sex scenes imaginable. Immobilized by surprise, I stared and read. Sex as a joke, sex as an aberration, sex as punishment, sex as a way to be abnormal, without consequences, and certainly sex without love. A banner through the middle of the page proudly announced links to topics like "Midgets," "Bestiality," "Animals," etc.

I had fallen into hell and was about to be frozen in salt.

This happened in my office, and I first ashamedly looked around to see if anyone was watching. Seeing no one I quickly moved to get out of this site! Somehow I couldn't! These devils had rigged their site so that once in it you couldn't easily get out! I had to turn off the computer to get away from these disturbing images.

I'm 63 and not a prude. I have seen a lot over the years. This happened three weeks ago, and I still can't get the images from my mind.

A friend of mine was sitting with her 13-year-old daughter at the computer, doing research for a school paper. The topic was "Invertebrates." They instructed the search engine to choose one of the...