It will change the world by making all commerce even more global. The information superhighway will not change the world by globalising pornography, though it will do that, if only as a side-effect. Computer networks at the moment are like the News of the World in that all human life is there, and some of it doing unsavoury business. It may never grow much bigger, at least until our present telephone lines are replaced with something much more capacious. I’m looking for people out there who have HOMEADE (sic) footage to trade.’An Englishman named Mark Aldrich appeals for ’someone in the Netherlands who will send me X-rated videos direct’ And so on At the moment all this is a very small trade. com’ offers ‘about six videos of myself having sex with various chicks to trade.

All of it must be legal where it is physically offered for sale An American with the nom de plume ‘ak47yberverse. It is not usually computer porn: most of it seems to be videos. But if you know what to ask for, you will find a great deal.One Usenet group is devoted entirely to the sale of pornography. If you search through Compuserve for Usenet discussions about sex, you will find nothing. It does, however, carry the global discussion groups known as Usenet.

Compuserve, the largest commercial networking organisation in Europe, has been signing up 1,000 new English customers a week this summer to join the 2 million members it has worldwide.Compuserve does not distribute pornography, and would not distribute Doom’s immediate predecessor, Wolfenstein, because the plot involved shooting Nazis in a castle hung with swastikas, which violated German laws against the display of Nazi insignia. It is almost as difficult to keep unauthorised computer software out of a country as it is to keep out unauthorised radio broadcasts.No one knows how many computers in Britain are hooked up to to the various international computer networks which are converging into a single global Internet. But the success of Doom 1 indicates the enormous difficulty facing any country which wishes to censor computer games. It will even have been certified by the British Video Standards Council. What they do distribute, and very successfully, is violence.The next version of Doom will be sold by more conventional means, and into a ready-made market, when it appears in October.

There is a network of hackers, he said, ‘young people of any age under 20′ who were exchanging tips about how to dial the US free of charge and then download pornography for hours, which they then passed around their friends.However, all the evidence suggests that even in the States, where the use of computers and modems is far more widespread than in this country, partly because local phone calls are free, computers are still not a very important channel for the distribution of pornography. All can be downloaded by anyone with a modem and a credit card.John Loader, Elspa’s chief investigator, claimed yesterday that children did not even need money to get at this pornography. These can be pictures, usually scanned from magazines or ‘grabbed’ from videos, moving full-colour sequences, some with noises, or simply stories. The back pages of American computer magazines contain numerous advertisements for ‘Adult Bulletin Boards’ which contain huge numbers of pornographic files. They made their fortune from players who wanted more: for dollars 50 they sell a full version of the game, three times as large as the free one – and, incidentally, far too large to distribute practically down telephone lines.An intelligent, determined and computer-literate child with a credit card and a flexible phone bill could get Doom and, with more difficulty, amass a huge collection of startlingly disgusting and realistic pornography.A modern personal computer with a CD-rom drive can reproduce moving images far more vividly (though on a much smaller scale) than a video recorder can.