While the number of Internet mental-health services are growing rapidly, there's still no solid evidence that good therapy can be done online, experts say. A lot of concern remains about doing online therapy because we don't have the research yet to show it's safe and effective. I think what's going on is not therapy, it's education,'' says psychologist John Grohol, an online mental-health pioneer from Austin, Texas. According to Grohal, the Web has an estimated 12,000 mental-health sites. It remains to be seen whether this is a viable relationship in and of itself, or if it's only an adjunct to a real-world therapist.
Confidentiality is a major concern about such services provided online.
19-member, Commission on Child Online Protection will meet for the first time next week, over a year after it was created after First Amendment problems scuttled two laws aimed at shielding children from online pornography. The commission is made up of a diverse group of children's advocates, administration officials, industry representatives and academics. The Internet community has been outraged by a recent patent that some believe benefits commercial interests at the expense of the Web as a whole. Tim O'Reilly, a publisher of computer books and an activist for open source, calls patents like Amazon's a rip-off , and believes it signals a major change in the way the Internet works. The people who are filing these patents come in as parasites.