Communications Decency Act

The Communications Decency Act (CDA) is a controversial bill passed by the U.S. Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996. It was an attempt by the federal government to address public concerns about pornographic material on the Internet. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the law on June 27, 1997, in arguably the first landmark ruling in the history of the Internet.

Senator James Exon, a Nebraska Democrat who had been a two-term governor of Nebraska before his election to the U.S. Senate in 1978, introduced the bill. It was initially brought forward as part of the larger Telecommunications Reform Act of 1994, but Congress adjourned that year before putting it to a vote.

During the next Senate session, alarmed by the apparent anti-free-speech provisions of Exon's amendment, Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, issued his own amendment to the Telecommunications Reform Act, proposing that Exon's 1994 CDA provisions be tabled to give the U.S Justice Department 150 days to study the best ways to regulate pornographic material on the Internet. Exon reacted by issuing another amendment, this one striking all of Leahy's proposals and reinserting his 1994 CDA provisions. The debate in the Senate from that point focused on which of the amendments the Senate should pass. Eventually, they chose Exon's.

In Senate debate, Leahy questioned the constitutionality of the Exon bill. “I do not think under this amendment a computer user would be able to send a public or private e-mail with the so-called ‘seven dirty words,’” he argued. “Who knows when a recipient would feel annoyed by seeing a four-letter word online?”

Exon responded by arguing that the United States did not have 150 days to wait for a government study while America's children became further defiled by [Page 77]online pornography, nearly half of which, Exon claimed, depicted the sexual torture of women. “If nothing is done now, the pornographers might be the primary beneficiary of the information revolution,” he said.

Exon's fellow senators agreed, and the CDA passed 84–16 on June 14, 1995. The U.S. House version, known as the Cox-Wyden bill, passed on August 14, 1995, without debate on the CDA issues. However, CDA provisions were resuscitated in the “Hyde amendment,” a late change endorsed by Senator Henry Hyde (Rep.) of Illinois. A version of the bill containing Hyde's amendments passed into law, signed by President Clinton on February 8, 1996.

In the 1997 book Sex, Laws and Cyberspace, authors Jonathan Wallace and Mark Mangan argue that the CDA, while “innocuous or even incomprehensible” on first blush, was actually “a radical attack” on free speech. First of all, the authors write, the U.S. Supreme Court had already ruled on the applicable issues in a 1957 case, which declared that First Amendment protections forbade a state from restricting adult free speech to a level acceptable to children. Further, the authors maintain, the CDA sought to restore long-discredited “indecency standards.” They point to a 1971 case involving a protester convicted of wearing a jacket with a profanity scrawled on it. Justices overturned his conviction, saying that the government “has no right to cleanse public debate to the point where it is grammatically palatable to most squeamish among us.”

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