THE Internet is a wondrous creation. It has been to this generation what the invention of the car was to our grandfathers and what the invention of the steam engine was to our great-great-grandfathers.

It has revolutionised our lives to such an extent that, like trains and cars, we take its usefulness and ubiquity for granted.

Yet it has its downside. Everyday, it seems, there are reports of people downloading thousands of paedophilic images and everyday anyone with an e-mail account is bombarded with advertisements from dubious sex sites.

Only last month we reported how a depressed Durham University graduate killed himself after becoming addicted to a cocktail of drugs bought over the Internet. At one time, he was receiving 300 powerful anti-depressant tablets a day from a variety of unregulated websites.

And now comes a game, based around 9/11, that can only be described as "sick".

The Internet and its users should not be pilloried just because of this game. There are sick minds on the margins of every group in society - just think how quickly sick jokes sweep through offices in the aftermath of any tragedy.

The question is what do we do about it? We clearly don't want games like this being downloaded by our children into our homes.

Parents can protect their children's computers by fitting them with a "net nanny" which prevents unpleasant downloads, but computer-literate children can find ways of circumnavigating such devices.

We could demand that the British Government creates some form of regulatory system, but this would probably be utterly ineffective. This 9/11 site, for instance, is hosted in the US and out of reach of British regulations.

We could demand that the US government regulates against such sites. But what else would the US government want to regulate against? Any site that deplored taking military action in Iraq could be deemed to offend American interests and so be shut down. This would destroy the Internet.

Indeed, China - which possesses probably the world's biggest regulatory resources - has tried to shut down all American sites which it found were subverting the minds of its young people into wanting freedom and human rights. After a week, the Chinese government's attempts ended in failure and were abandoned.

So regulation of the Internet will probably have to be left to the next, cleverer, generation to grapple with. In the meantime, the best defence is awareness. All parents must be aware that there are sick sites within the grasp of every search engine and their vigilance is required.