Supreme Court Strikes Down Internet Censorship

The Supreme Court placed the fate of the Internet in the hands of its users Thursday, ruling that the government’s attempt to censor cyberspace “abridges the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment.”

The court unanimously slapped down the 1996 Communications Decency Act and left it up to parents to decide for themselves what their children can and can’t see in the vast online world.

“They found the notion of congressional content regulation to be dead wrong,” said Leslie Harris, a public policy consultant for the American Library Association, one of the chief plaintiffs in the case.

But at least one group that staunchly supported the law, the Family Research Council, vowed it would press Congress for a new statute. And many observers expect Sen. Dan Coats, R-Ind., the act’s co-author, to introduce some replacement aimed at controlling content.

“The court is telling parents to abandon any hope of a decent public culture, and simply to barricade their children behind the walls of Surf-Watch,” Coats said in a statement. “It is telling families to fend for themselves in an Internet universe of raw indecency.”

Despite such protests, experts said the sweeping nature of Thursday’s decision appeared to leave little room for fresh legislation.

President Clinton said Thursday that the administration would study the Supreme Court decision carefully, while maintaining staunch opposition to the transmission of obscenity over the Internet - something that remains illegal.

“The Internet is an incredibly powerful medium for freedom of speech and freedom of expression that should be protected,” Clinton said. “But there is material on the Internet that is clearly inappropriate for children … we must give parents and teachers the tools they need to make the Internet safe for children.”

Clinton vowed to convene meetings of industry groups, teachers, parents and librarians to find other ways to protect kids from smut on line. Possibilities include ratings systems and blocking technology like the “V-chip” mandated for television sets.

On-line activist groups, along with Internet service providers, promised to offer web sites that would provide information on software parents could use to block material they didn’t want their kids to see.

The American Library Association said it would work to develop ratings and other measures that would help librarians steer children to age-appropriate Internet sites, without forcing libraries to ban sites or drop use of the Internet altogether.

The tools of technology helped spread news of the Internet decision worldwide faster than perhaps any other decision in the Court’s history.

Thanks to a one-time arrangement with the normally low-tech Supreme Court, the full text of the 10:02 EDT decision was on a floppy disc in the hands of online advocates at 10:04. They used an Apple Powerbook laptop and wireless Ricochet modem to post it publicly on the Internet eight minutes later.

In the decision, the court accepted the arguments of civil libertarians, and the finding of a three-judge federal panel last year, that the Internet is entitled to the broadest possible free speech protections.

The decision was hailed by the group of organizations who fought the law as “an historic day not only for free speech in cyberspace, but for the growth of the infant medium and the development on electronic commerce.”

“The Supreme Court has written the Bill of Rights for the 21st Century,” said Jerry Berman, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, one of the groups that sued to overturn the CDA. “We are elated.”

The justices dismissed government arguments that without regulations like the CDA, Internet growth would be stifled as parents opted to keep their families offline.

“We find this argument singularly unpersuasive,” wrote Justice John Paul Stevens in the main opinion. “As a matter of constitutional tradition, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we presume that governmental regulation of the content of speech is more likely to interfere with the free exchange of ideas than to encourage it.”

Stevens wrote that the there was “no basis for qualifying the level of First Amendment scrutiny that should be applied to this medium.” The CDA, therefore, is unconstitutional, because of the “obvious chilling effect” of the law’s broad content-based ban on cyberspeech and attachment of criminal penalties to violations.