The net is not to blame for the Soho nail bomber, we are

The Old Bailey heard yesterday how alleged nail bomber David Copeland learned his bomb-making skills on the internet.

The claim prompted another round of tabloid faux surprise that such dangerous information can be so freely available. Calls for tighter regulation of the internet's content will, inevitably, follow.

One thing is certain: if you want to find out how to make a bomb, an internet user of even moderate expertise is likely to be able to find the most famous guide named in many of this morning's newspapers - The Terrorist Handbook - within minutes. It is linked to from all the most popular search engines.

The Terrorist Handbook has been on the net for years, in various forms, and pre-dates the world wide web itself by a few years. Written in the kind of collaborative effort that also produced the open source software movement and the Linux operating system, it is "mirrored" around the web. In other words, the same text lives on several different internet servers around the world, and is not owned by any individual.

All these factors make it very difficult to censor. Technically, for instance, it might be possible to remove the text from a British server, but in the US the first amendment right to free speech makes such a move very difficult. The British webmaster could quite easily comply with an order to delete the handbook by moving it from his servers to ones based in the US, or any number of countries around the world.

Such heavy-handed attempt to censor internet content would also meet in a great amount of resistance from some of the internet's most active citizens, guaranteeing that the handbook would end up mirrored on more servers around the world than before the attempt to smother it.

It is not that these "netizens" necessarily agree with amateur bombing campaigns, or even that they are against censorship. The internet, after all, has a long tradition of censorship ranging from "flaming" of people with unpopular or anti-social views to the widespread removal of The Terrorist Handbook from servers - by the webmasters themselves - in the wake of the 1995 Oklahoma bombing.

But there is unlikely to be enough of a backlash to ever completely remove books like these from the net. The sheer scale of the internet means that, just as there will always be someone willing to follow out its instructions to a tragic conclusion, so there will be someone willing to act as a virtual accomplice and post the material. Even if the impossible happened and it vanished from the internet altogether, such material has long been available by mail order, albeit from more obscure sources than the net.

It doesn't make an easy headline, or offer an instant panacea. But perhaps our outrage should be diverted from the net itself to those who create the supply, and demand, for the dark side of the net. For, no matter what its greatest evangelists might claim, the internet still tends to reflect society, rather than shape it.