The move came after mounting public pressure from fundamentalist religious groups and other dubious defenders of morality. Email campaigns and threats of boycotts persuaded the company to back away from the adult entertainment industry.

Jeff Mallett, Yahoo!'s president and chief operating officer argued, "We consistently strive to act responsibly and constantly evaluate our policies based on what our users tell us."

Read: we buckle under pressure from the loud, unrepresentative fringes of society.

Just who were some of the "users" Mallett was speaking of?

The American Family Association (AFA) was one. Noted for its gay-bashing agenda and its anti-sex and anti-swearing campaigns, this far-right US group claiming to be Christian attempted to associate Yahoo! with child porn and called on people to "politely express (their) outrage" at Yahoo! by threatening to boycott the company.

The AFA were not the only religious movement on the warpath against Yahoo! last week. The BBC reported that religious authorities in Saudi Arabia had called for a boycott of Yahoo! over the adult content issue.

What a lovely multi-faith movement: let's all get together in God's name to support censorship.

I guess it doesn't occur to those religious leaders in the great religious capitals of the world, such as Mecca and Tupelo, Mississippi (home of the AFA), that if someone can ban a Web site they don't like, then someone else can just as easily come along and ban the Qur'an or the Bible.

Well, it must have been a full moon or something last week, because the anti-sex meddlers seemed to be oozing through the cellar walls everywhere. In Wisconsin, for example, the neurally challenged Wisconsin Bar Association protested against a statue of Justice, which they considered topless and demanded to be covered.

But while the Taliban's control over the Wisconsin Bar Association may only be temporary, the trend in the world of online content does not look good. Yahoo!'s climbdown concerning adult offerings comes just after Yahoo!'s other celebrated retreat over the removal of Nazi paraphernalia from its auction pages following French complaints.

If major Web players are going to be successfully bullied like this, are we now to face an Internet where everything that might be considered offensive to anyone anywhere in the world will be banned? Will Web users be treated like ignorant children, incapable of making their own decisions about what to view and what not to view?

Shame on Yahoo! for giving in to the self-appointed censors.

Andrew Stroehlein founded the Central Europe Review in 1999 and has been writing and editing for print, television and online outlets in Europe since 1996. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of internetcontent.net, where this article originally appeared.