This post guest-blogged by Spike Wyatt. Spike is a computer geek, animal lover and freelance writer.

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In the immortal words of Louis Skolnick in the 1984 classic Revenge of the Nerds': "All jocks ever think about is sports. All we nerds ever think about is sex." The Internet is a nerd's wet dream come true.

The Internet has been around for a lot longer than many people think, since they are mostly referring to the Web as opposed to the underlying structure. However, even back in the days before there was any form of HTML and the Internet was a text-only proposition, porn was prevalent. Rather than having a simple click-to-view interface, images and video files were encoded into text and transmitted most often via the Usenet newsgroups. There, they could be downloaded by anyone with a connection, re-encoded into their distinctly more graphical form and viewed. All pretty much for free, with very little control and certainly no legislation.

Then, one day, the Web appeared. It grew. It exploded. It turned into an enormous, all-encompassing mass of uncountable pages on every subject, covering every tiny interest and foible of everyone on the planet. It worked its way into our lives and into our homes, where it has now become so ubiquitous that people without access are almost considered to be deviants.

With this easy access, increased bandwidth and faster transfer times, web sites have been able to provide services we only dreamed of a mere decade ago. One of the biggest, most profitable services is porn. Any Internet user who does not have parental control software installed can easily see how common online porn has become: just type sex' or porn' into a search engine and wade through literally millions of responses. All tastes are catered for, from the basic to the extreme, the literary to the close-up graphical. There is seemingly no end.

Whether porn is legal depends very much on where a person lives. The USA, for example, has slacker laws than the UK, where hard-core pornography is still illegal or at least censored. Other countries may not allow it at all, or only with strict censorship. Yet others don't care what you see or even encourage sexual freedom. There is little common ground in international law because every country deals with the subject on their own terms, by their own standards. Given that web sites are generally accessible from anywhere in the world, this means that filtering, censoring or controlling content is an extremely difficult job. If your country doesn't allow it, just connect overseas!

Thankfully, there are some areas where everyone agrees: child pornographers are hunted internationally and prosecuted; real rape, hate crime and other extremely violent sex-based sites are investigated and closed down; laws are finally being put in place to ensure that the people performing on porn sites are of the minimum required age.

Second only to the legal implications is the problem of scale. Even if every country agreed that they wished to remove porn from the Internet, the practicality of such a task would be questionable. The sheer volume of content is astounding. At the easiest level, ISPs could remove as much content as they could find, but even then there would remain the problem of personally-owned servers and of site operators moving their content regularly to avoid detection. Directives would need to be imposed, requiring formidable efforts from law enforcement agencies. The only easy part would be finding the manpower (if you'll excuse the pun): I suspect that job adverts looking for people to spend their day hunting porn would receive a huge response.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, is the question of personal freedom. A legal obligation for content producers to remove all porn from their sites would be seen by many as an impingement of their civil liberties, of their freedom of expression. To monitor the content could be considered to be a Big Brother' operation in itself an invasion of privacy. Outcry from the adult industry would ensue, with questions on where the lines should be drawn between art, erotica and porn, whether any government has the right to dictate such rules and endless debate about the intrinsic value of such content. It could be the start of the Free Love Revolution. Naughty schoolgirls with guns. Exploding vibrators. The dangers are unimaginable.

So is it a realistic objective to wish to rid the Internet of porn? In a word, no. No more so than it is to try to rid the world of pornographic magazines, of nude photos and paintings, of sex scenes in films and television or of people posting saucy pictures of themselves for their lover.