Welcome. Welcome back to the tech policy podcast.

I'm your host, Corbyn Barthold, Internet Policy Council at Tech Freedom.

I'm flying solo today, looking at the pattern of episodes that I have done by

myself. This one's the third. Seems pretty clear to me that what gets me jabbering alone on this

show are attacks on the Internet.

It's what gets my juices flowing.

States have taken to passing laws that putatively seek to restrict minors' access to the Internet.

Specific targets of these laws are social media websites and services, and pornographic websites.

There are all kinds of collateral damage that these laws do to adult speech rights and to everyone's privacy rights. We'll see how much of those other aspects of the law I get into today.

For present purposes, the focus is on speech and the internet. The internet is a place to

speak and it is a place to receive speech. So you would think that these states need to grapple

with the First Amendment. Several important Supreme Court decisions protect speech on the internet.

The most prominent of these is Reno versus ACLU, decided in 1997, which says that the First Amendment applies with

full force online. We will get to other decisions later, I promise. Those who want to

regulate the internet with these new state laws, generally seem to understand that they need

to get around these decisions. Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah, while passing one such law,

said quite simply that Reno versus ACLU and other internet precedents are wrongly decided.

We know new facts about the internet and about the social media platforms, he said,

that were not available when cases like Reno were decided.

I will be recurring often today to a trio of individuals, Adam Kandube, Claire Morel, and

Michael Toscano, who are major boosters of these laws. They write in the Federalist that the

precedents employ outdated understandings of the Internet.

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