After a long time there will be just two nets in the US, one for Beaver Cleaver to read safe 'n clean educational posts on, one approved of by Jesse Helms, and another, perhaps at lower bandwidth to the rest of the world, but with good bandwidth within the country, that's more or less like the internet right now. One general asked him how they would cut off the connection in times of war, so that the enemy couldn't get into Milnet and cause trouble. The recently failed Communications Act of 1994 had an amendment introduced by Senator Exon, in which operators of information services would be held accountable for the materials they provide to the public. The basic idea was to ensure that the operators of BBS's, FTP sites, and Usenet News feeds checked the ID's of their customers before providing them with pornography or other proscribed material. Around the same time, and Australian internet provided dropped alt.sex, a.b.p.e and other sexually explicit newsgroups because a church threatened to sue under Australian obscenity law.
Someone needs to get a clue here.
Show him how you can telnet to publicly accessible NNTP ports in any nation that is on the internet and read any group you want. Before the news was widely available here in Santa Cruz, that's how UCSC students read the news. NNTP servers even provide a simple user interface for this, somewhat akin to telnetting to the mail port to plop a message directly into someone else's machine. Wow him by logging into a machine on the Internet halfway around the world, and reading the news the normal way. The best that the Honorable Exon can do is to shift all the proscribed content to other nations.