>>151384
2/2

Back then the trojan horse excuse was also the protection of minors. Again, from the book by Wendy Grossman:
>On June 26, 1997, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down, on constitutional grounds, specifically the First Amendment, the Communications Decency Act (CDA), passed on February 1, 1996, as a rider to the Telecommunications Bill and signed into law by President Clinton on February 8, 1996. The CDA would have criminalized the knowing transmission of indecent material to a minor

>People seem unnerved by the notion that private areas may exist over which the [internet] services have no control, but as long as people who use those areas are consenting adults or children with their parents’ consent, it’s not clear why they should be subject to any restrictions greater than those imposed on members-only clubs in real life

>Clinton had barely gotten the official fountain pen back into the presidential inkwell after signing the Telecommunications Bill into law before two suits were filed against the Department of Justice seeking to overturn the CDA. The two cases were joined together for hearing in Philadelphia, and the twenty-seven plaintiffs included the American Library Association, the American Booksellers Association, CompuServe, America Online, Microsoft, Netcom, Prodigy, Wired Ventures (the publisher of Wired magazine), Apple, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Society of Professional Journalists, and the Commercial Internet Exchange, plus the Citizen Internet Empowerment Coalition, representing approximately 56,000 Netizens. Simultaneously, many Web sites turned their backgrounds to black in protest and posted the now widespread blue ribbons supporting free speech online. Shortly afterward, two more suits were filed in New York

At the time that specific law in the US gt shut down for risking free speech on the internet:

>On June 11, U.S. District Judges Dolores Sloviter, Stewart Dalzell, and Ronald Buckwalter in Philadelphia struck down the CDA in the best kind of judicial language. “The Internet may fairly be regarded as a never-ending worldwide conversation. The Government may not, through the CDA, interrupt that conversation. As the most participatory form of mass speech yet developed, the Internet deserves the highest protection from governmental intrusion,” the justices wrote. They concluded, “Just as the strength of the Internet is chaos, so the strength of our liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of the unfettered speech the First Amendment protects.”

>The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) summed up the case against the CDA as follows: “[that] the law is unconstitutionally overbroad (criminalizing protected speech), that it is unconstitutionally vague (making it difficult for individuals and organizations to comply), that it fails what the judiciary calls the ‘least restrictive means’ test for speech regulation, and that there is no basic constitutional authority under the First Amendment to engage in this type of content regulation in any nonbroadcast medium.”

What worries me the most is that unlike the opposition against the CDA by the early internet users, there doesn't seem to be any resistance by official means from the public