The internet is perhaps the most seemingly tame of technologies that truly is a beast. It provides so many of us with so much information. With the internet, millions of Americans book travel flights, buy products, email friends, read the news, and engage in other typical, yet highly important and useful activities on a daily basis. Since the internet is accessible worldwide, the information on the internet has a largely remained free, like a very, very, very, very, very, very large library of information, culture, personal experiences, thoughts, beliefs, accounts, and so on. If it’s universally accessible, why then are filters placed on filters for school computers? What ever happened to the right of free speech? Although I highly value free speech and the spread of knowledge and information, because schools follow in loco parentis, meaning they act as a surrogate parent during the school day since the parent cannot be at school, filters are a good and simple way to ensure the integrity of a site a child may view at school. Because the schools act with in loco parentis in mind, and also because the vast majority of students (except for some seniors in high school) are not legally adults yet, the school, as a surrogate parent, can block certain sites or use a program to block various sites or types of site for the students. It then follows that the school may also reasonably set a hierarchal structure, allowing high school students to view content perhaps slightly more intense or violent than middle school students, and middle school students intense content than elementary students. Some contend that internet filtering should be compared with that of selecting textbooks.