representatives still feel that the Act should remain intact.One major flaw of the CDA is that it uses "community standards" to judge what is considered legal on the Internet. Unlike most forms of media, the Internet has no defined community; it is a decentralized, ungoverned body that is accessible to every person with a computer and a telephone line in the world. If there are "community standards," to which community do they belong? Do they belong to the communities of the Netherlands where prostitution and marijuana are legal, or to the communities of Bible-belt American, where family values are top priorities? The CDA went beyond its jurisdiction by claiming that "community standards" was the device with which to measure indecency. The standards of conservative lawmakers should not be the standards that gauge the appropriateness of the Internet, and these lawmakers are wrong to assume that their morals are mirrored in "community standards" throughout America.The vast library located on the Internet would be transformed into nothing more than a "children's reading room, where only material suitable for minors could be viewed and discussed," since the bill would have made books such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye illegal in electric form5. Banning books solely because they are in electronic form is a direct infringement on every American’s First Amendment rights. If the Act were ruled constitutional, adults would find no educational value in using this new medium that has so much potential for progressive growth. If intellectual books were banned for no other reason than Congress’s attempt to protect American’s youth from the ills of society, the net would be abandoned by many individuals over the age of eighteen. When The Catcher in the Rye and the King James Bible become symbols of the ills of society, then maybe I will see the CDA’s point. Until that time, it is every Americ...
