Looking Forward To Next 20 Years Of A Post-Reno Internet

from the your-free-internet dept

Earlier this week, we wrote a little bit about the 20th anniversary of a key case in internet history, Reno v. ACLU, and its important place in internet history. Without that ruling, the internet today would be extraordinarily different -- perhaps even unrecognizable. Mike Godwin, while perhaps best known for making sure his own obituary will mention Hitler, also played an important role in that case, and wrote up the following about his experience with the case, and what it means for the internet.

The internet we have today could have been very different, more like the over-the-air broadcast networks that still labor under broad federal regulatory authority while facing declining relevance.

But 20 years ago this week, the United States made a different choice when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its 9-0 opinion in Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, the case that established how fundamental free-speech principles like the First Amendment apply to the internet.

I think of Reno as "my case" because I'd been working toward First Amendment protections for the internet since my first days as a lawyer—the first staff lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which was founded in 1990 by software entrepreneur Mitch Kapor and Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow. There are other lawyers and activists who feel the same possessiveness about the Reno case, most with justification. What we all have in common is the sense that, with the Supreme Court's endorsement of our approach to the internet as a free-expression medium, we succeeded in getting the legal framework more or less right.

We had argued that the internet—a new, disruptive and, to some large extent, unpredictable medium—deserved not only the free-speech guarantees of the traditional press, but also the same freedom of speech that each of us has as an individual. The Reno decision established that our government has no presumptive right to regulate internet speech. The federal government and state governments can limit free speech on the internet only in narrow types of cases, consistent with our constitutional framework. As Chris Hanson, the brilliant ACLU lawyer and advocate who led our team, recently put it: "We wanted to be sure the internet had the same strong First Amendment standards as books, not the weaker standards of broadcast television."

The decision also focused on the positive benefits this new medium had already brought to Americans and to the world. As one of the strategists for the case, I'd worked to frame this part of the argument with some care. I'd been a member of the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (the WELL) for more than five years and of many hobbyist computer forums (we called them bulletin-board systems or "BBSes") for a dozen years. In these early online systems—the precursors of today's social media like Facebook and Twitter—I believed I saw something new, a new form of community that encompassed both shared values and diversity of opinion. A few years before Reno v. ACLU—when I was a relatively young, newly minted lawyer—I'd felt compelled to try to figure out how these new communities work and how they might interact with traditional legal understandings in American law, including the "community standards" relevant to obscenity law and broadcasting law.

When EFF, ACLU and other organizations, companies, and individuals came together to file a constitutional challenge to the Communications Decency Act that President Bill Clinton signed as part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, not everyone on our team saw this issue the way I did, at the outset. Hanson freely admits that "[w]hen we decided to bring the case, none of [ACLU's lead lawyers] had been online, and the ACLU did not have a website." Hanson had been skeptical of the value of including testimony about what we now call "social media" but more frequently back then referred to as "virtual communities." As he puts it:

"I proposed we drop testimony about the WELL — the social media site — on the grounds that the internet was about the static websites, not social media platforms where people communicate with each other. I was persuaded not to do that, and since I was monumentally wrong, I'm glad I was persuaded."

Online communities turned out to be vastly more important than many of the lawyers first realized. The internet's potential to bring us together meant just as much as the internet's capacity to publish dissenting, clashing and troubling voices. Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote the Reno opinion, came to understand that community values were at stake, as well. In early sections of his opinion, Justice Stevens dutifully reasons through traditional "community standards" law, as would be relevant to obscenity and broadcasting cases. He eventually arrives at a conclusion that acknowledges that a larger community is threatened by broad internet-censorship provisions:

"We agree with the District Court's conclusion that the CDA places an unacceptably heavy burden on protected speech, and that the defenses do not constitute the sort of 'narrow tailoring; that will save an otherwise patently invalid unconstitutional provision. In Sable, 492 U. S., at 127, we remarked that the speech restriction at issue there amounted to ' 'burn[ing] the house to roast the pig.' ' The CDA, casting a far darker shadow over free speech, threatens to torch a large segment of the Internet community."

The opinion's recognition of "the Internet community" paved the way for the rich and expressive, but also divergent and sometime troubling internet speech and expression we have today.

Which leaves us with the question: now that we've had two decades of experience under a freedom-of-expression framework for the internet—one that has informed not just how we use the internet in the United States but also how other voices around the world use it—what do we now need to do to promote "the Internet community"?

In 2017, not everyone views the internet as an unalloyed blessing. Most recently, we've seen concern about whether Google facilitates copyright infringement, whether Twitter's political exchanges are little more than "outrage porn" and whether Facebook enables "hate speech." U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May, who is almost exactly the same age I am, seems to view the internet primarily as an enabler of terrorism.

Even though we're now a few decades into the internet revolution, my view is that it's still too early to make the call that the internet needs more censorship and government intervention. Instead, we need more protection of the free expression and online communities that we've come to expect. Part of that protection may come from some version of the network neutrality principles currently being debated at the Federal Communications Commission, although it may not be the version in place under today's FCC rules.

In my view, there are two additional things the internet community needs now. The first is both legal and technological guarantees of privacy, including through strong encryption. The second is universal access—including for lower-income demographics and populations in underserved areas and developing countries—that would enable everyone to particulate fully, not just as consumers but as contributors to our shared internet. For me, the best way to honor the 40th anniversary of Reno v. ACLU will be to make sure everybody is here on the internet to celebrate it.

Mike Godwin (mnemonic@gmail.com) is a senior fellow at R Street Institute. He formerly served as staff counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and as general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia.

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Filed Under: cda, cda 230, first amendment, free speech, internet, reno v. aclu


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  1. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 29 Jun 2017 @ 12:12pm

    ahh the internet...

    A certain sign that people want real democracy in the world.
    It's also a sign that people will happily gang up on and harm people they don't agree with.

    What a fucking conundrum this is!

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. icon
    Ryunosuke (profile), 29 Jun 2017 @ 12:44pm

    lets just get this out of the way now....

    Fucking Internet Nazis.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  3. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 29 Jun 2017 @ 4:19pm

    That's nice Mike. Did you ever consider that in the next 20 years the internet as we know it wont even exist?

    link to this | view in thread ]

  4. icon
    charliebrown (profile), 29 Jun 2017 @ 5:00pm

    Australia. "The land down under" means backwards.

    Well, somewhat. Whilst we can swear our heads off on free to air television provided the appropriate timeslot and rating (HBO's "Deadwood" has been on free-to-air television here!) any streaming service is supposed to still classify it's content. And X-rated material (i.e. porn) is banned.

    Of course, nobody seems to expect user generated content sites to be classified. So YouTube doesn't have to but Netflix (I believe) is supposed to. And as for porno being banned, well, there is no rule against watching porn, as long as you don't let someone under 18 see it, you're just not allowed to host/offer it here. Confused?

    link to this | view in thread ]

  5. identicon
    Lurker Keith, 29 Jun 2017 @ 5:45pm

    messed up

    That's nice. Of all the things Godwin should be known for, it's his observations about internet posts that everyone knows.

    Everyone should be aware, instead, of his contributions to Internet Freedom.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  6. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 29 Jun 2017 @ 7:48pm

    Considering the way that people's use of the internet has evolved, particularly the herding into just a handful of mega-sites --all of which censor far beyond legal requirements-- government censorship may be superfluous.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  7. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 30 Jun 2017 @ 12:00am

    Re:

    My thoughts exactly.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  8. icon
    PaulT (profile), 30 Jun 2017 @ 2:00am

    Re:

    Not a particularly confusing situation. People naturally want freedom and a choice in how things are run, so desire democracy. However, human nature means that minorities may be oppressed by the majority, sometimes violently, so that freedom needs to be tempered with some kind of order.

    The only thing that the internet has really done is to expose the full range of human behaviour, once anonymity and the idea that you no longer need to be accountable for your actions are introduced. If any of it shocks you, you've not been paying attention to how some people are once you remove the need for politeness in a situation.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  9. identicon
    Thad, 30 Jun 2017 @ 10:34am

    Re:

    Spoken like someone who doesn't remember AOL.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  10. identicon
    Thad, 30 Jun 2017 @ 10:34am

    Re: Re:

    What I'm more surprised by is the kind of shit people will publish under their real names.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  11. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 30 Jun 2017 @ 7:40pm

    Re: Re:

    Though I never tried the service, I remember AOL as a company that constantly handed out free floppy disks so people wouldn't ever have to buy their own storage media (or drink coasters).

    Anyway, during the 1990s, there were many dozens of ISPs to choose from, most of which cost much less than AOL and had much better user-to-port ratios so getting connected was instant instead of AOL's time-consuming chore of sequentially trying out dozens of phone numbers until finding one that was not busy.

    In short, only complete idiots bought AOL (imaging ghost of P.T. Barnum).

    But yeah, I miss those days when ISPs actually competed with each other, and there were many great bargains to be found. And perhaps best of all, if you ever got your internet service cancelled (for copyright infringement or whatever else) you had literally a hundred other choices of ISPs to join.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  12. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 3 Jul 2017 @ 1:06am

    Even though the Louvre in France was afraid of the CDA, because of artwork on their website, they did not have to be. Even if the CDA had been upheld, the people at the Louvre would have not been subject to the CDA, because the Louvre, and its servers, are in Paris.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  13. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 3 Jul 2017 @ 1:13am

    Another problem though was the fact that most Internet users, at the time, were dial-up users. A rich person, who could afford the cost of an international call could have simply dialed up to a foreign ISP and been able to get around CDA censorship

    A dial-up ISP, in, say Canada, would not have been subject to US prosecution for accepting incoming calls from a US Customer.

    Just like SOPA, if passed, would not have affected users in northern parts of Idaho, Montona, or North Dakota, since a lot of users do get wireless internet from across the border in Canada, because normal broadband is not available, and dial-up would require a long distance phone call.

    Wireless ISPs in Canada are not subject to US laws, even some of their subscribers are in the United States.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  14. identicon
    Thad, 3 Jul 2017 @ 1:55pm

    Re: Re: Re:

    Anyway, during the 1990s, there were many dozens of ISPs to choose from, most of which cost much less than AOL and had much better user-to-port ratios so getting connected was instant instead of AOL's time-consuming chore of sequentially trying out dozens of phone numbers until finding one that was not busy.

    In short, only complete idiots bought AOL (imaging ghost of P.T. Barnum).

    That's how I feel about Facebook. And yet, AOL was, and Facebook is, wildly popular.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  15. identicon
    Zidane, 16 Oct 2017 @ 8:53am

    Hello

    I Dont Understand

    link to this | view in thread ]


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