Let's go back to 1996.

You know, Seinfeld friends, the Simpsons were still good, and the World Wide Web was the Wow Wow West.

There were still great fortunes to be made and a lot of freedom, maybe too much.

Congress was very worried about one thing.

That's Jared Schroeder.

He's a professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, SMU.

He studies free expression and emerging technologies.

There's a famous Time magazine cover, and it's got the words in big letters, cyber porn.

This new thing, the World Wide Web, was open and free.

For the first time, nearly everyone had knowledge at their fingertips fingertips and the freedom to connect with people

all over the world. But that freedom also meant easy access to obscene and indecent content

to anyone with internet access, including children. The very same stuff I try to keep my kids

from not seeing today, right, 25 years later. Congress's solution? The Communication Decency Act, or CDA, which passed in 1996.

One of the goals of the law was to keep children from watching sexually explicit content on the web.

The law was meant to try to limit the ability of children to have access to indecent and obscene content.

If something is obscene is not protected by the First Amendment and the government can regulate it all

it wants. But if it's indecent but not obscene, the government generally cannot regulate it. It is

protected by the First Amendment. So putting indecent limitations on indecent content into the law kind of triggered a First Amendment

problem. So the American Civil Liberties Union quickly sued the government in the case

Reno versus ACLU. The main argument was that censorship provisions in the Communications Decency Act were unconstitutional

because they criminalized expression protected by the First Amendment.

The ACLU argued that terms like indecency were too vague.

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