ie-Melon group conducted a survey, with the permission of BBS operators, and found individual consumers in 2,000 cities in all 50 states and 40 countries, including countries like China, where possession of pornography can be a capitol offense (Elmer-Dewitt 1). Perspective of The Courts In recent years, the Supreme Court has struggled to prevent access by minors to speech that is harmful to them, while safeguarding the First Amendment rights of adults to engage in nonobscene speech. Generally, the court measures the Governments interest in protecting minors from harmful speech relative to its accessibility. The provisions of the CDA were to prevent minors from obtaining access to pornography on the Internet. However, the Supreme Court ruled that two provisions were unconstitutional and that they failed to narrowly apply to minors, and could restrict the free exchange of ideas due to their vagueness. This note argues that any future attempt to regulate sexually explicit Internet transmissions must be drafted very specifically (Simon 1). Although the court appreciated the laws purpose of protecting children from indecent material, it ruled that the interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society outweighs any theoretical but unproved benefit of censorship. Justice OConnor made this analogy, that makes it a crime for a bookstore owner to sell pornographic magazines to anyone once a minor enters his store. (Ford Marrin Esposito Et Al 1). Perhaps the following precedent has been adopted by our justice system, When a statute has the effect of restricting adults to viewing only material suitable for children, it will be stricken down. Parent PerspectiveDue to several cases in the last few years, it seems that there has been a parent panic and many parents feel that there should be stronger laws to censor Internet pornography. Still, some believe that that would be unconstitutional, and that parents need to ass...
