Some journalist colleagues were recently discussing the effect of the Internet on UK censorship laws, particularly those relating to pornography. Where 'obscene' material is concerned, the UK has some of the strongest censorship laws in Europe, and indeed the world. You may think that the UK's moral minority is quite justified in this respect, and that it's only a select few perverts in long coats who have any interest in pornography. But the evidence suggests otherwise. Consider the sale of top-shelf magazines for a start. Although WH Smith doesn't sell them anymore, virtually every other newsagent in the country does, as do petrol stations, railway kiosks and so on. It's probably fair to say, therefore, that there are about 40,000 places in the UK where you can buy Playboy, Paul Raymond's finest and some lesser-known titles.

So, let's assume that each of those outlets stocks an average of five different titles, and sells five copies of each. That's 25 magazines per month, per outlet, or a total of 1,000,000 magazines per month. Now add on subscriptions, callers to phone sex lines (which are so popular they are even advertised in mainstream magazines and local newspapers), imported videos and magazines, sex shops, shows like Erotica, table-dancing clubs, strippers (male and female), and any other form of non-contact visual or aural stimulation (that's 'aural'...). Whether or not you believe that pornography is degrading or offensive - and research suggests that women are just as likely as men to, ahem, enjoy pornography, although much less likely to actively seek it - it's impossible to deny that it is, in its various forms, just as popular in the UK as it is elsewhere.

Of course, the entertainment industry already knows this. Sales of video recorders were partly driven by the availability of blurry Seventies porn films. Polaroid cameras offered the chance to take whatever pictures you wanted, without a nosy chemist shopping you to the police. And so these, along with camcorders with low-light capability and more recently digital cameras, quickly found their way into the bedroom. Early sales of CDROM drives thrived on the availability of discs full of dodgy GIFs, while the first users of the multiple camera angle features in DVD video technology have been pornographers. Use your imagination...

Many new technologies have been driven by sex and the Internet is no different. Early scare stories in the tabloid press slated the Web for providing easy access to pornography. Which it does, although it's interesting to note that those same tabloids are now cashing in on the ISP craze and helping to provide access to such material for their readers. Before it folded, Business Computer World magazine ran an interesting feature on how 'normal' businesses could learn from the Internet porn industry. Citing "Danni's Hard Drive" (www.findtheURLyourself.com) as an example, it explained how such businesses had well-established secure networks, in-house credit card processing and video streaming software while the rest of the world was still wondering what 'e-commerce' meant. Video-on-demand facilities, when they eventually arrive, are likely to be used almost exclusively for pornography until the rest of the world catches up.

Which brings us nicely back to UK censorship law. How can the authorities restrict access to Web servers based in other countries - where hardcore pornography is legal - and so stop one-handed typists in the UK viewing high-quality streamed video that leaves no trace on the user's hard drive? It will be difficult, if not impossible, to enforce the law. Short of introducing new legislation that would severely breach personal privacy rights, the government may be forced to admit defeat. It seems that, with the help of the Internet, the dirty old men could win the day.