A federal law intended to restrict children's access to Internet pornography died quietly Wednesday at the Supreme Court, more than 10 years after Congress overwhelmingly approved it.

Websites, featuring what the Chinese government has called vulgar content, have been closed down. Over 90 websites containing pornographic and political material has been removed since China announced its Internet morality campaign. China's ruling Communist Party has a history of engaging in web purges, in attempts to remove pornography, political criticism and web scams. Officials have now threatened tougher penalties for those companies disseminating the material. In the past the crackdown on Internet content has included the big search engines, Google, Microsoft's MSN and Baidu.

In an unusual legal case arising from the increasingly popular practice known as “sexting,” six Pennsylvania high school students are facing child pornography charges after three teenage girls allegedly took nude or semi-nude photos of themselves and shared them with male classmates via their cell phones.

Hong Kong government is completing its first round of consultation on the Control of Obscene and Indecent Article Ordinance (COIAO) at the end of January, 2009. The most debatable section is on the control over online new media as the existing practice of indecent and obscene censorship is very arbitrary and the extension of the ordinance to the internet may violate freedom of speech and expression. Moreover, the anti-smut campaign in China has become a pretext for political censorship, internet users in Hong Kong also worries that ISP level filtering will give an infrastructure for political censorship in the future.