 |
Myth Boxes
The Final Frontier: Cyberspace and the First Amendment
Navigating the superhighway, surfing the net, e-mailing, and postingmessages on one of the thousands of newsgroups of the Usenet havebecome familiar activities and even preoccupations for millions ofAmericans. Whether through the Internet or the commercial on-lineservices, a rapidly growing number of Americans are becoming "jacked in"to cyberspace.
Among the many alluring qualities of cyberspace is that itfacilitates person-to-person contact that is not mediated by largeorganizational structures. The Internet, for instance, is an opensystem; no single organization owns it. Instead it is operated by thealmost 5 million members (called hosts) who freely function acrossinternational borders and answer to no single nation or corporation.Disdaining the top-down hierarchical structures of traditionalinstitutions, the Internet is a grassroots system whose users are oftenfervently dedicated to keeping it that way. There are protocols ofbehavior, but these are created and enforced by the users. (Those whoviolate convention may be subject to flaming—being bombarded byinsulting messages.) Hierarchical controls and limitations, on the otherhand, are for many users an abomination to be fiercely resisted.
Nevertheless, the First Amendment is not an absolute, even incyberspace. The most significant effort to date to restrict speech incyberspace occurred with the passage of the 1996 Communications DecencyAct (CDA). As part of a larger effort to amend the 1934 FederalCommunications Act, the CDA replaced the word "telephone" in the 1934law with "telecommunications equipment," thus bringing cyberspace underthe act's coverage. Further, the CDA made it a crime to transmit "any .. . image or other communication which is obscene or indecent knowingthat the recipient is a minor." Violation of the act is punishable bytwo years in prison and/or a $250,000 fine.
Contending that the act violated the First Amendment, a coalition ofgroups including the American Civil Liberties Union, the AmericanLibrary Association, and the United States Chamber of Commercechallenged the law. The subsequent Supreme Court decision in Reno v. ACLU produced a partial victory for CDA opponents. Writingfor the majority, Justice John Paul Stevens struck down that portion ofthe act prohibiting knowingly sending indecent materials to a minor.Although Justice Stevens acknowledged that the government had alegitimate interest in protecting children from exposure to indecentmaterials, the CDA, he argued, threatened to suppress too much speechamong adults. According to Justice Stevens, "the interest in encouragingfreedom of expression in a democratic society outweighs any theoreticalbut unproven benefit of censorship."
Still, cyberspace is not an unregulated forum since the court letstand that portion of the CDA that prohibited transmitting obscenematerials. Moreover, the pressure to regulate cyberspace is likely tocontinue and grow more intense as the popularity of cyberspaceincreases.
| |
