UNSHACKLING NET SPEECH

One of the key ideas behind the Internet was to build a computer network that could withstand a nuclear holocaust. Last week the Net proved its resilience in the face of another sort of attack. The Communications Decency Act, signed into law by President Clinton last year, was designed to protect children by prohibiting "indecent" speech or images from being sent through cyberspace. But even before Congress passed the legislation, free-speech advocates were blasting it as an unacceptable infringement on the First Amendment.

Now the Supreme Court has agreed that the CDA is precisely that. The court, while disagreeing about some issues in the case, unanimously concluded that reducing online communication to a safe-for-kids standard is unconstitutional. "The interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society," wrote Justice John Paul Stevens, "outweighs any theoretical but unproven benefit of censorship."

It was a decisive--though not unexpected--victory for civil libertarians. Opponents of the CDA, led by the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Library Association as well as dozens of other plaintiffs, including Planned Parenthood and Human Rights Watch, had argued that the statute was so vaguely worded and ill defined that discussions in online chat rooms about abortion or contraception could have attracted the vice squad. Says Ira Glasser, executive director of the A.C.L.U.: "It would have criminalized all sorts of speech that would never have been criminalized before."

And that, said the court, could have crippled the Internet, which now has some 50 million users. Indeed, wrote Stevens in his 15-page opinion, the CDA threatened "to torch a large segment of the Internet community." Clearly the Justices, like many newbies before them, were swept up in the global reach and boundless potential of the medium. "Any person with a phone line can become a town crier with a voice that resonates farther than it could from any soapbox," Stevens observed.

Minutes after the ruling was handed down, the court could have seen that phenomenon in action. At the click of a mouse, the text of the opinion was piped across the Net and plastered on computer sites from New York City to Australia. A laptop computer in New York was used to "Netcast" the audio portion of an A.C.L.U. press conference to all corners of the earth. Chat rooms and message boards were choked with Net folk weighing in about what it all meant. Computer jocks even ventured forth into the sunlight for real-time, nonvirtual victory parties. "Let today be the first day of a new American Revolution--a Digital American Revolution!" said Mike Godwin, attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, addressing a crowd of revelers in San Francisco.

CDA proponents were every bit as vociferous in defeat as their counterparts were in victory. Members of the anti-porn group Enough Is Enough, led by former Gary Hart co-scandalist Donna Rice Hughes, demonstrated outside the Supreme Court with signs that read HONK IF YOU HATE PORN and CHILD MOLESTERS ARE LOOKING FOR VICTIMS ON THE INTERNET.