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Mr. Lessig once again has come up with a very sensible solution. However, he solved the wrong problem from the point of view of the government.

Politicians like Ashcroft who rail against "porn" on the Internet are using it as a tool like they use "terrorism" in the real world. The term "porn" is being used to villify the Internet and as a call to identify everyone who accesses the Internet.

Like "terrorism", "porn" is one of those perfect words with which a politician can always make it look like he is fighting crime while he is simultaneously increasing his power over an uncontrolled medium. There is no way to advocate freedom when that freedom is to distribute "dirty" pictures or videos.

So, while I think that Lessig's solution would virtually eliminate child access to online porn, it has little hope of being adopted by governments in whose interest it is to identify everyone who has access to the Internet. In fact, I would not be surprised if more than 99% of real porn sites today had meta tags marking them obviously as porn sites. This may be true if only for the sake of search engine scores.

Another thing to think about is this: What benefit would (even illegitimate) porn mongers have to gain from distributing to children? Children do not have credit cards. Children do not buy sex toys. At best, they would be viewing popup ads -- which would be waisted advertising because they are never going to pay for anything. Really, the only place children may not be able to be protected is in email from porn spam.

Considering the risk of social and governmental reprisals for distributing to minors, it would obviously be in every porn purveyor's interest to tag their porn. Especially from the stand point of search engine placement. Further, it cannot be argued that it is too difficult as restricted access through passwords and copyright notices are much more difficult to implement.

Maybe someone should do a survey of porn sites on the Internet to discover what percentage are obviously marked as porn in the meta tags. Then again, who would want to have a term like "porn" associated with their degree. "I wrote my doctorial thesis on the global distribution of pornography on the Internet" would not sound good in an interview...