Today is the ten-year anniversary of the Supreme Court decision striking down the Communications Decency Act—a landmark ruling for Internet freedom of speech. Thanks to the decision, the Internet (in the US) now enjoys the same freedom of speech protections as print and remains more open than either television or radio. On the tenth anniversary of the decision, let's take a quick look back.

The Communications Decency Act was passed in 1996. The goal was to protect children from harmful content on the Internet, which sounds great in theory but turns out to be terribly difficult to implement in practice. Many groups believed that the CDA was overly vague and could restrict all sorts of legitimate speech between adults, and the ACLU took the lead in the legal challenge to the law.

The case worked its way up to the Supreme Court, where it became the first Internet-related case addressed by the Court. Reno v. ACLU was decided on June 26, 1997, and it struck down major sections of the CDA.

The Court found that the law was imprecise; regulating speech generally requires highly-specific controls, and the text of the law did not meet that standard. The CDA did not define "indecent" and "patently offensive," nor did it include the caveat that "patently offensive" material with some socially redeeming value would be allowed. The justices found that filtering on the user end (that is, by parents) was a less-troubling method of filtering out unwanted Internet content.

But if radio and television can be regulated, why can't the same regulations apply to the Internet? The justices found that the two mediums are quite different; spectrum for over-the-air radio and television signals is limited, for instance, and expensive to use (setting up a large-scale transmitter in studio costs serious money), making "speech" over the airwaves available to only a privileged few. By contrast, the Internet is so simple and inexpensive to use as a publishing medium that it deserves the same First Amendment protection as print.

The ruling was a strong statement of support for freedom of expression on the Internet at a time when the Web was just entering mainstream consciousness. The EFF's David Sobel, a co-counsel in the case, said yesterday that "the Reno decision defined the First Amendment for the 21st century. The Court wrote on a clean slate and established the fundamental principles that govern free speech issues in the electronic age."

Congress attempted to craft a better bill soon after, passing the Child Online Protection Act the following year, but it too was never enforced. Tied up by the same legal challenges that derailed the CDA, COPA met the same fate as its predecessor earlier this year when a federal judge ruled that the bill was unconstitutional.

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