How 7 words unfit for TV fostered an open Internet 20 years ago today

Twenty years ago, on June 26, 1997, the Supreme Court issued a landmark decision and unanimously overturned congressional legislation that made it unlawful to transmit "indecent" material on the Internet if that content could be viewed by minors. The justices ruled that the same censorship standards being applied to broadcast radio and television could not be applied to the Internet.

"The record demonstrates that the growth of the Internet has been and continues to be phenomenal," the high court concluded. "As a matter of constitutional tradition, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we presume that government regulation of the content of speech is more likely to interfere with the free exchange of ideas than to encourage it." The legal wrangling over the Communications Decency Act happened when the commercial Internet was primitive compared to today. The ACLU says it didn't even have a website when the CDA was signed into law in 1996. And the ACLU's lawyers on the case had never even used the Internet, either.