In the light of this week's ground-breaking sentence against a paedophile who found victims via Internet chatrooms, Digital Media Manager HOWARD DAVIS looks at the conundrum of policing the World Wide Web.

This week Peter Green received a five-year jail sentence after finding young victims on the Internet. This conviction was the first of its kind.

Green, a 33-year old divorcee, from Buckinghamshire, logged on to a chat room entitled Younger Girls For Older Men, where he met and seduced a 13-year-old girl. The cyber-relationship culminated in Green meeting the young girl, taking her back to his flat and abusing her.

Initially passing himself off as a 15-year-old boy, Green had built up a two-month on-line relationship with the girl during which he had sent her pictures of himself naked.

He claimed these had been taken by his last girlfriend, who had also been 13 years old.

Judge Christopher Tyrer described Green's act as "premeditated, persistent and determined" before handing down a harsher than usual sentence.

It is plain that Green's act was both pathetic and depraved, but it is also one that would have been very hard to stop. The majority of web-hosting companies purge any child pornography or other paedophilia-linked material from their sites - yet Green was using a private chatroom.

Moreover, Green was disguising himself as a teenager. The new Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) Bill (which I mentioned a few weeks ago) giving the police extra power in cyber-space would not have been of use until Green acted in a suspect manner. Unfortunately, comments such as "I believe the way we feel about each other will mean we will always stay together" do not exactly start alarm bells ringing.

Children are nave and will often wander astray through curiousity. Green took advantage of this.

For parents, the only way to stop this happening is to limit children's access to the Internet. Both Internet Explorer and Netscape have facilities to control what children view, and specialised service providers, such as Kidz.Net only allow access to approved sites.

Yet the young girl in question was 13 - about the age when children are given the responsibility to think and judge for themselves. Just as the awful tragedy of Sarah Payne has taught parents that children can no longer frolic in the countryside at will, so this case highlights the danger of allowing impressionable teenagers to use the Internet at will.

The public domain may be well policed - more through companies' desire to appear morally upright than any true utilitarian desires - but the private realm of the Internet is still open to anybody and everybody.

At a debate sponsored by Guardian Unlimited, Yaman Akdeniz, director of the British free speech pressure group Cyber Rights & Cyber Liberties, described the Government's new RIP Bill as "one of the most outrageous pieces of legislation introduced in this country". Somehow, I don't think that the latest victim's parents would agree with this.

It was argued that the Internet should not be policed any differently from other media. Yet the Internet is much more powerful than any other media. It is open to all, allows its message to get across the globe, and can hold vast reams of information - a feat no other medium can match.

On the Internet's tenth anniversary, Tim Berners-Lee, the British scientist who invented the world wide web described the notion of censoring the Internet as "horrific".

His argument was that one individual cannot tell another what to do, see or say. A laudable ideal, but in the light of recent developments, should this be the case?

As David Kerr, chief executive of the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), pointed out: "The Internet is a wonderful tool and a magnificent opportunity. It brings us all together. But it also brings together people who are better kept apart."

Without sounding like a knee-jerk liberal, something needs to be done about matters that are illegal for truly moral reasons. Child pornography and paedophilia are social diseases that need to be eradicated. Yet, the last thing I would want is the whole ideal of the Internet - that anybody can have their say, that information can be shared between individuals in far-flung places - should be stifled.

There is no easy answer. Look at the anarchy caused when the News Of The World published its lists of peadophiles. Yet, as the Internet continues to grow and expand at an ever-increasing rate, a solution of some kind must be found. Before it is either too late, or before we reach the point where the only answer is to censor the Internet until it is little more than a foil for governments and multi-nationals.