Protecting Children from Harmful Materials on the Internet: The US Experience (A Discussion on the First Amendment and Internet)

State and federal governments have long struggled to implement statutes that regulate children’s access to harmful materials on the information highway. However, it is not easy for the government to provide substantial protection for children on the internet while protecting the First Amendment rights of all Americans. The tension between these critical interests has produced consecutive legislative debates and several Supreme Court decisions. Although there are several forms of expression that can be harmful to minors this paper focuses exclusively on obscene and pornographic materials. When creating a regulation attempting to control children’s ability to access materials on the Internet, applying “cliché” standards to this new medium creates several difficulties and unsatisfactory results. In fact, the genuine and rapidly developing character of the internet prevents Congress from generating lawful and rational solutions related to children protection. The paper will first explore the application of the First Amendment to the governmental efforts to control access on to the internet obscenity and pornography as harmful materials to children. This part will briefly examine, the Communications Decency Act (CDA), the Child Pornography Prevention Act (CPPA), the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) and the Supreme Court’s reactions over them. Part II of this paper will analyze the general scope of the problem that both Congress and the Supreme Court seek to solve and will discuss whether filtering, a recently displayed remedy, is a constitutional and effective solution for this problem.