is that it puts the government in control of the rating system.14 Floyd Abrams, a First Amendment Lawyer, was a little more blunt. He commented that "[the V-chip] is First Amendment-friendly the way Henry VIII was wife-friendly."13 Markey denies that the government will have control over the rating of programs. Broadcasters, he says, have exclusive responsibility for setting up a rating system and rating their programs. If the broadcasters fail to develop a rating system within one year, the legislation calls for a government advisory board to simply develop a set of categories for the ratings. At no time, however, will the advisory board, or any other governmental group, be in control of the rating of any programs.11 While the television industry has formally issued a statement7 stating their intent to develop a voluntary rating system8, there is certain to be a number of legal challenges to the V-chip provision. The ACLU, for one, has already issued a law suit9 challenging, in part, the constitutionality of the V-chip. The politicians who drafted the bill foresaw the inevitability of legal challenges, and added Section 561 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, titled, "Expedited Review." This section calls for the first challenge to go directly to a district court of three judges. Any appeal to the outcome will go directly to the Supreme Court. This is intended to prevent the implementation of the V-chip from being delayed for years while challenges go through the regular channels.2 Another complaint by the broadcasters is that there is simply too large of a volume of programs to rate all of them. As an example, they say that there are fewer than 600 movies that have to be rated each year15 by the Motion Picture Association of America10, while there are over 600,000 hours of cable programming that would have to be rated each year.8 Markey responds by pointing out that there are thousands of people working for the networks that go ov...
