Go to the Decency Special Report.

The CDA: How We Got Here

Washingtonpost.com Staff
September 1997

The Communications Decency Act became law on Feb. 8, 1996, under Title V of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. It extended an earlier law originally intended for television and radio.

The changes as written would have imposed fines or prison sentences on anyone transmitting "indecent" material with an electronic device. Courts have defined "indecent" as anything depicting "sexual or excretory activities or organs."

The action sparked protests online and off. The most visible was the Blue Ribbon Campaign sponsored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Voters' Telecommunication Watch, organizations that seek to apply civil liberties to new technologies. The campaign convinced thousands of publishers to turn their Web pages black in defiance. Soon after the protest, the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit against the government for violating the First Amendment. They were joined by other groups, including the American Library Assocation.

Supporters of the CDA started their own ribbon campaigns. They called the law an excellent means to protect children. The "Responsible Speech" white ribbon page and the Green Ribbon Campaign are two examples.

On June 12, 1996, a district court in Philadelphia struck down the CDA as unconstitutional. A three-judge federal court in New York also struck down the law. The U.S. Department of Justice appealed the rulings to the Supreme Court, which also ruled the decency provisions of the act unconstitutional.

The Clinton administration has said that it will not support future laws that seek to regulate Internet content. Instead, the White House will support screening technologies that prevent children from seeing inappropriate material on the Internet.

Web site developers have been working on smut-blocking ratings and software. The World Wide Web Consortium has established the Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS), a rating system that allows Web publishers to designate their sites inappropriate for children. Dozens of software programs designed to protect Web-surfing kids have also come on the market (as outlined in this recent Navigator column).

In fact, the whole Internet community seems to be working toward solutions more flexible than the CDA to keep kids and porn apart. After all, "decency" would have been the strictest moral-legal standard ever imposed on a medium in the United States. Even before the Supreme Court decision, the law's original sponsor, former Sen. James Exon (D-Neb.), said he would back away from some of its provisions.