One of the great benefits of the Internet is that thousands upon thousand of non-yet-religious-Jews watch and listen to shiurim. These are not people who will go to a Beis Medrash and thus the only way they will be exposed to Torah is on line.
There is a well meaning person in Israel who spends endless amounts of money trying to convince people how horrible Internet is and spreads his leaflets and books in the hundreds of thousands. His basic assertion is that one may not use it under any circumstances - even email!! If you use it - good bye olam haba ח"ו. [Thank G-d that he doesn't decide who actually goes to Olam Haba]. One of his favorite methods is calling the Internet a Holocaust and showing pictures of marching Nazis.
The Internet is not the Holocaust. We thank Hashem that it is not and it is a grave error to conflate the two - w/o in any way minimizing the spiritual harm that the Internet does.
Recently he disseminated a leaflet claiming that all of the Torah that is learned by these irreligious people means NOTHING b/c after watching a shiur they then go and watch pornography and the like.
I don't know how often this is the case [although I am sure that it happens]. But I DO know what the Zohar Hakadosh writes in Parshas Terumah - no good thought is ever lost!!!! The thoughts of Teshuva that one has in this world are what extricate a person from Gehenom in the next! So even if the person goes right back into the schmutz there is great value in the time he spent hearing דברי א-להים חיים.
Ideally - no pritzus, no filth, no lashon hara, no time wasting, no leitzanus etc. etc. and the Internet is filled with all of that to no end. But if in our imperfect world hundreds of thousands of people are hearing Dvar Hashem through the Internet then it is clearly a tremendous Bracha within the קללה. And for THAT - הודו לה' כי טוב כי לעולם חסדו!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
