UNSHACKLING NET SPEECH

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Legislators seized the moment as well. "Parents are going to have to realize that a computer without any restrictions to children is just as dangerous to their minds and development as a triple-X store," said retiring Indiana Senator Dan Coats, co-author of the CDA. "The court has ignored the clear will of the Executive Branch and the Congress and the clear will of the American people."

In fact, though, the court did not rule that government cannot regulate the Internet. Nor did it alter the long-standing legal prohibition against obscenity, which remains unprotected speech, both on and off the Net. It simply said that the CDA as written was fatally flawed because in trying to protect children it would also keep adults from getting material they have a legal right to see. That gives CDA forces hope that they'll be able to revisit the issue. "The opinion gives us a good road map to what the courts will allow," says Bob Flores, senior counsel of the National Law Center for Children and Families. Vows Don Hodel, the recently installed president of the Christian Coalition: "We won't accept this as the last word."

Nor, evidently, will the President. The White House began backing away from its support of the clearly doomed CDA months ago. But Administration officials have recently come at the problem from a new angle. They propose to fight technology with technology. This week President Clinton will convene a meeting of Internet providers, family groups and others during which he'll propose to protect kids from indecency with a software fix.

While the details have yet to be worked out, White House staff members hope to talk Website operators into a kind of universal rating system. Combining it with software browsers used to access much of the Net, parents could in theory set their own comfort level and filter out the naughty bits. "If we are to make the Internet a powerful resource for learning, we must give parents and teachers the tools they need to make the Internet safe for children," Clinton said last week. "With the right technology and rating systems, we can help ensure that our children don't end up in the red-light districts of cyberspace."

Good luck. Software filters and online ratings systems have been around since before the CDA was born, and they've always been beset with problems. Recently, for instance, when Microsoft began backing a ratings standard known as RSACI and started including the filter as part of its browser, Internet Explorer, the company quickly found that the "solution" could keep large numbers of viewers away from its news site, MSNBC. Microsoft quietly removed the rating. The problem should have been foreseen. News, after all, frequently covers violent, adult-oriented subjects, which puts many news stories into the same verboten range as porn. While RSACI officials have proposed offering a news exemption, it's hard to see how that could work. Readers of the sex-oriented newspaper Screw, for instance, might well consider it just as newsworthy as the New York Times.