2006: Big year for online-kid safety

There have been many flashpoints between free speech and children's online safety since the US Supreme Court struck down the Communications Decency Act (CDA) in mid-'97, but 2006 looks second only to 1997 as a crucial year for online kids advocacy. Why? Because of two developments: 1) blogging's popularity among/risks to kids has become mainstream news nationwide (online safety has reached an unprecedented level of public awareness), and 2) the fate of the Child Online Protection Act (COPA, aka "son of CDA") is to be decided in federal court this fall. In "They Saved the Internet's Soul," Wired News provides excellent background. The "they" in that headline is the Supreme Court, and what the court understood in striking down CDA was the difference between TV and the Internet. If the justices had upheld CDA, Wired News reports, it would've been "the Taliban Internet" or censored for a 12-year-old user base (at least where US-based Web sites were concerned), because CDA "aimed to extend to the Internet the same 'decency' standard that applies to broadcast TV and radio, and is now most famous for leading to fines for Howard Stern and CBS television for explicit language and a wardrobe malfunction respectively." Among other things, the decision showed that local and even national standards (or those of a current national government, because lawmakers have had a tough time defining national standards) are extremely difficult to apply to a "radically decentralized" international medium, and US courts continued to wrestle with this when confronted with COPA. That's what the Philadelphia federal appeals court will look at – local standards vs. international medium, protecting free speech vs. protecting children - for the third time this fall.

Check out the Wired News article for a sense of how the Net and its users have changed since the court's decision on CDA, and (on p. 2) which of its provisions were not challenged and do help protect kids. For more on preparations for COPA's next trial, see my 1/20 issue. [For the fascinating latest twist on the "local standards" issue (about free speech & human rights, not just kids' rights), see USATODAY - Congress has stepped in!]