Congress Must Not Restrict Internet

On Thursday, President Clinton took yet another step away from ideals of democracy and civil liberties by signing the Communications Decency Act into law. The act--a sweeping reorganization of the laws which govern the communications and media industry in America--contains provisions we find totally unacceptable as college students and American citizens.

Most of the new act deals with deregulating competition in the newspaper, television, cable and telephone businesses. But our focus will be the bill's indecency provision. Pushed through congress by a small faction of conservative Republicans, with Representative Henry J. Hyde at the vanguard, the provision mandates fines and prison terms for those who make "indecent" material available to minors. Even Newt Gingrich did not support this measure. The flaws inherent in this bill become apparent during a straightforward examination of the phrase make indecent material available to minors."

First of all, we believe that "indecent" is a heinous concept to adopt as a legal standard because it is so eminently undefinable. In general legal parlance, "indecent" is a superset of "obscene", and hence includes not only sexually explicit material but also four-letter words and sexual material deemed "patently offensive" by local community standards. Under this standard, anything ranging from pornographic animation to a frank discussion of AIDS could be construed as indecent and draw the fire of federal prosecutors. Ironically, any document which explicitly describes what the new law prohibits would be theoretically banned from the Internet. We urge all to think of what this means for freedom of speech and the marketplace of ideas.

Even if it were possible to define "indecent" with some degree of rigor, the bill would still be fatally flawed because the Internet is simply too dynamic and fluid to effectively regulate. For example, a private e-mail sent from one person to another can easily find its way onto a bulletin board where it is accessible to the public. Thus, the four Cornell first-years who recently authored an infamous e-mail which insulted women and used four-letter words could well have found themselves in trouble with the federal government. It doesn't matter that their e-mail was originally a private message to friends; the fact that it spread so rapidly, unknown to them, could easily have brought the message to the hands of a minor--and the misogynistic Cornellians to a courtroom. Although their message was offensive, it was protected under the First Amendment. As extensive users of electronic communication, Harvard and other college communities are especially affected by this new law.

But perhaps the biggest problem is the burden imposed on commercial on-line services. To date, some of these companies have made it their policy to censor themselves to some degree, while others have not. The point is that they had the choice. Now, all on-line services will be forced to assume the unreasonable burden of screening the millions of pages of information they carry each day, lest they somehow allow an indecent message to find its way into the hands of a minor.

The motives of the sponsors of these new laws may be noble, or they may simply be an attempt to use the law to impose a set of values on the entire United States. Either way, we feel that the indecency law is entirely unacceptable both for practical and ideological reasons. While we agree that it is important to prevent children from accessing certain types of materials, this in no way requires the federal government to invade civil society in this manner. If the Republicans want to follow Bob Dole's lead and urge on-line companies to voluntarily regulate their content, this is fine. Even laws requiring the software equivalent of the V-chip would be acceptable, because they would in no way restrict what could legally be posted on the Internet, but rather would bolster the ability of parents to privately and individually control what their children see.

We only hope that this law will be struck down by the Supreme Court at the first opportunity. We also suspect that it will prove difficult and cumbersome to enforce. But whatever the eventual outcome, the signing of this bill is bad for the Internet, bad for freedom of speech and bad for society.