The fight against the dissemination of content offensive to human dignity and the protection of minors against exposure to content that is harmful to their development are of fundamental importance in enabling new audiovisual and information services to develop in a climate of trust and confidence. If effective measures to protect the public interest in these fields are not rapidly identified and implemented we run the risk of these new services not reaching their full economic, social and cultural potential. Chapter I of this Green Paper identifies those aspects of the development of new audiovisual and information services that are relevant for the protection of minors and of human dignity and analyzes the categories of content that may give rise to problems. It underlines the need not to confuse problems that are different in nature, such as child pornography, which is illegal and subject to penal sanctions, and children accessing pornographic content for adults, which while being harmful for their development may not be illegal for adults .
Solutions have to be designed to take account of the type of content in question.
They also have to be adapted as a consequence of the evolution of the service environment. They are evolving away from the mass media model, where the viewer's choice is between watching a programme or not, towards a model that is closer to publishing i.e. where the viewer selects his or her programme from a wider choice. On-line services take this evolution further towards the individual communication model. In geographical terms distribution networks are l ess national and increasingly global in nature , Internet being a world-wide network of networks. Moreover, new types of content are emerging.