The first thing I saw today was that the Supreme Court got the CIPA decision wrong. CIPA [Children's Internet Protection Act] was a law Congress passed a few years ago in the panicked and irrationally fearful quest to protect children from pornography. The law requires that libraries receiving federal funds install filters on computers that children may use.
The Supreme Court decided that since filters were easily disabled on request that they didn't pose a 1st Amendment burden. But the court got it wrong by focusing on the burden placed on Internet READERS. The problem is that filters pose an unconstitutional prior restraint on the PUBLISHERS of information. Publishers such as me.
One of the first web pages I ever made was one called "Click Here for Pornography." (And there you go - I bet this post gets my blog banned from filters too.) It was a clear example of political speech -- I made what looked like a brick wall plastered with posters and signs advertising such things as "Girls Girls Girls" and "XXX," etc. Each graphic linked to some sort of public policy site, like the US House of Representatives. The purpose of this page always was to demonstrate the irony of trying to regulate this type of thing, that just because "bad" words were written it didn't always mean the content was actually "bad."
I am sure, though, that because I used "bad" words I am blocked from filters. Now, perhaps I might be able to appeal to each and every filter company and ask to have my site be reviewed and put on the acceptable list, but WHY SHOULD I HAVE TO?
What it boils down to is that the federal government is paying 3rd parties (with questionable filtering technologies) to censor me on the Internet. I may not have a site explicitly intended for children, but either children are connected to the Internet or they aren't. There's no "play area" on the Internet - the Internet's value and potential comes from how it connects *everything* together. If they wanted children to be connected only to things explictly deemed "good," they should have made the civic investment on connecting schools and libraries to a closed network, not the Internet. No, the Government made the explicit policy decision TO CONNECT CHILDREN TO THE INTERNET, and as a result, now the government is inserting itself as an arbiter of what can be published to it. That is censorship, and that is where the unconstitutional violation on freedom of speech is.
The fact that the government is essentially outsourcing the censorship decisions to the various demonstrably-fallable filtering companies doesn't release it from the culpability. Rather, it underscores the burden placed on the individual speakers on the Internet who now need to knock on the door of each and every filtering company in order to ensure that their freedom of speech is not trampled on. Logistically this is burdensome, and since the filtering companies have no legal requirement to accept such pleas, Internet publishers have effectively been muted from the marketplace of ideas.