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which the services have no control, but as long as people who use those areas are consenting adults or children with their parents' consent, it's not clear why they should be subject to any restrictions greater than those imposed on members-only clubs in real life.

It is arrogant and provincial to think that the United States is the only country with the technological know-how and motivation to create information networks. It is virtually certain that all over the world there are people using the same technology in unexpected and hidden ways that we don't know about, even if some have been slower to get started for economic and regulatory reasons (see chapter 13). An estimated 60 percent of 9.4 million Internet hosts--machines or networks that provide Web sites, Usenet news servers, and email services--are based in the United States. That leaves a pretty substantial number that are outside direct U.S. control but from which information flows as seamlessly to U.S. citizens as to the rest of the world.[2]

It was against this background that John Perry Barlow called the First Amendment a "local ordinance" and British newspaper reporter Andrew Brown likened censoring the Net to "making a rule that you can only piss in the shallow end of the pool."[3] One of the more amusing sights on the Net is the American habit of invoking the First Amendment and its provisions like a mantra, even in areas dedicated to international politics or frequented mostly by users from other nations, and even though at least some of those users are not sure that unfettered freedom of speech is an unqualified benefit, and even if they were, certainly wouldn't want to be berated about it by snot-nosed American kids. Similarly, not everyone outside the United States appreciates the arrogance with which American Net commentators dismiss their efforts to control certain types of information--such as the testimony in court cases during trial--as censorship.

Clinton had barely gotten the official fountain pen back into the presidential inkwell after signing the Telecommunications Bill into law before two suits were filed against the Department of Justice seeking to overturn the CDA. The two cases were joined together for hearing in Philadelphia, and the twenty-seven plaintiffs included the American Library Association, the American Booksellers Association, CompuServe, America Online, Microsoft, Netcom, Prodigy, Wired Ventures (the publisher of Wired magazine), Apple, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Society of Professional Journalists, and the Commercial Internet Exchange, plus the Citizen Internet Empowerment Coalition, representing approximately 56,000 Netizens.[4] Simultaneously, many Web sites turned their backgrounds to black in protest and posted the now widespread blue ribbons supporting free speech online. Shortly afterward, two more suits were filed in New York.

Testimony was heard over six days in March and April, and, like anything to do with the Net, seems to have had its quirky moments. The author Howard Rheingold ( T h e Virtual Community), for example, testifying as an expert witness on the subject of life online, dressed in what plaintiff and reporter Declan McCullagh described on his Fight-Censorship emailing list as "a glowing blue suit, an iridescent pink shirt, and the first tie he's worn in a decade." Others testifying on behalf of the Net were Bill Burrington, director of public policy for AOL, and MIT's Albert Vezza, as an expert witness on the PICS Web content ratings system.

On June 11, U.S. District Judges Dolores Sloviter, Stewart Dalzell, and Ronald Buckwalter in Philadelphia struck down the CDA in the best kind of judicial language. "The Internet may fairly be regarded as a never-ending worldwide conversation. The Government may not, through the CDA, interrupt that conversation. As the most participatory form of mass speech yet developed, the Internet deserves the highest protection from governmental intrusion," the justices wrote. They concluded, "Just as the strength of the Internet is chaos, so the strength of our liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of the unfettered speech the First Amendment protects."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) summed up the case against the CDA a s follows: "[that] the law is unconstitutionally overbroad (criminalizing protected speech), that it is unconstitutionally vague (making it difficult for individuals and