The government appealed to the Supreme Court, not by writ of certiorari, but by direct appeal because the CDA itself provides for a right of direct appeal to the Supreme Court. The court accepted Reno v. ACLU for full review.The Court recognized the speech enhancing qualities of cyberspace, saying that the growth of the Internet has been and continues to be phenomenal. As a matter of constitutional tradition, and in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we presume government regulation of the content of speech is more likely to interfere with the free exchange of ideas than to encourage it. The Court ruled that the CDA places an unacceptably heavy burden on protected speech, which threatens to torch a large segment of the Internet community. With these words, the Supreme Court closed its opinion: The interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society outweighs any theoretical but unproved benefit of censorship. In a virtually unanimous decision written by Justice Stevens, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 to affirm the lower court decision striking down the CDA as unconstitutional. Justice OConnor, with Chief Justice Rehnquist, concurred in the judgment but dissented in part.In its ruling, the Court does several important things that will have an impact in the future. It gives evidence that the CDA is unconstitutional, it refutes its own decision in Pacifica v. FCC, and it tackles the analogy question about the Internet.The Justices agreed that the CDA violates the First Amendment due to its vagueness and overbreadth, calling the CDA a content-based blanket restriction on speech. They also found it ambiguous in that each of the two parts of the CDA uses a different linguistic form. The Supreme Court was very concerned that serious speakers on issues like birth control practices, homosexuality, and the consequences of prison rape would be dampened by the CDA. The severity of its criminal penalties may well ca...
