Pollution is a major plague confronting the world today. It is mostly witnessed in the atmosphere, or in the streets, but in fact pollution has reached other places in our lives, and one of the most important places is the internet. Sometimes unnoticed, especially to those who don't use the web or use it very little, internet pollution is becoming a daily topic in our lives.
May be the most common form of web pollution is viruses. Tens of thousands of viruses attack on a daily basis sensitive sites and workstations worldwide. In many cases the viruses are hidden in emails, messages or applications, which commonly offer internet users fictious and false services, such as instant rewards or pornographics etc...
Major IT institutions worldwide conduct and finance researches, in continuous attempts to win the race against a generation of viruses, that are becoming more harmful, destructive and more sophisticated day after day.
Another form of pollution on the internet is the huge number of meaningless articles, webpages, applications that are listed on the web, and the large number of such material that is uploaded on a daily basis as well. Some of it is benign and does not present any harm or disturbance to users, and the reason for its release on the net remains not understood, since it does not generate any kind of benefit for its authors or for the public. This certainty has recently pushed Google (the world's largest search engine on the internet) to adopt new measures with regards to web searching, resulting in a massive "cleansing" operation for the worldwide web, which has caused many editors to lose up to 50% of their publications from search engines results.
A serious kind of pollution on the internet is the kind where web surfers attempt to use the web for prohibited or even criminal practises, such as paedophilia, abduction, organ trafficking, drug dealing and terrorism. In Such cases the intervention of public prosecutions from the countries concerned is inevitable, and people who are involved in such crimes are nowadays easily tracked down and caught, thanks to new technologies available to governmental institutions, notably the latest generation of GPS. Needless to mention that very serious punishments await those who are involved in such crimes, as we have seen lately in Belgium and in Germany.
If the pollution of the atmosphere has prompted the UN to mobilise many major Heads of States to sign the Kyoto Protocol, the pollution on the internet would only require people to have more ethics, in business and in personal life. If ethics were to be observed, many other problems of our modern times would also be resolved.
