This research paper deals with the constitutional law and related policy issues raised by various proposed forms of censorship of material appearing on the Internet.
The Internet is a high speed computer network, which is used primarily by university and government personnel and which includes more than 8,000 connected networks world-wide. Service providers such as Prodigy, Compuserv and America Online and hundreds of local service providers offer subscribers access through modems which link personal computers (PC's) to Internet. Prodigy started with 25,000 subscribers in 1988. Internet today has approximately 20 million users (Garry 46). Internet is privately-owned, but its messages are carried in part over publicly-regulated telephone lines. It was originally sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in 1973 and whose high speed lines were initially built by the government-owned National Science Foundation (Faucette 1161; and Garry 46). One of its distinctive features is its interactive nature, including Electronic Bulletin Boards (BBS) which "allows users to 'post' messages or pictures for others, read or view messages left, by others and converse with other BBS users" (Handlebaum 709). Heralded as the forerunner of the information superhighway, Internet is only one of many computer-linked private and government datalinks and networks, which include fax, E-mail, Kids' Net, Telecommunications Co-operative Network (3,000 non-profit members) and other systems.
Initial Attempts to Regulate Content on Internet
Garry says that "information itself has become the principal product of the national economy" (4). Belsio says that "the Internet is so new that no one knows how to categorize it, much less regulate it" (3). Foreign governments in the People's Republic of China, Singapore and Bavaria have already sought to place limits on the content (i.e. censor) on Internet. A Munich prosecutor advised Compuserv th...