The pornography business has grown rapidly since the 70's, with the introduction of the Super 8 mm projector. With the 80's came the video cassette, allowing for easy home viewing pleasure. The 90's saw the introduction of a new medium to distribute and display pornography, the internet. The internet itself has gone under intense scrutiny, as pornography has and still does. The debate over whether or not pornography should be censored continues to grow in intensity and frequency. Advocates feel censorship can make the internet a secure place for kids, as well as making an attempt to kill off (or at least maim) a multimillion dollar industry. Others feel that censorship of internet pornography threatens our most basic and fought over civil right, the right to free speech. So the question arises, should the internet, with its vast expanse of endless pornographic sites, be censored?
Congress and then President Bill Clinton certainly thought so. He signed the 1996 Communications Decency Act, intended to ban online pornography and help make the internet "safe" for kids by eliminating "indecent" material. An amendment to the CDA was the Exon Bill, which attempted to outlaw obscene material and impose fines of up to $100,000 for and prison terms of up to two years for anyone who knowingly makes "indecent" material available to anyone under the age of 18. The definition of "indecent" was broad to say the least. "Indecent" included anything from a personal email to a friend telling them you were "pissed off" to pornographic material. Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe described it as "…frontal assault on the First Amendment." Another attempt by the government was "voluntary censorship". It started in 1996 with the Telecommunications Act. Television stations were "allowed" to "choose" to rate their programmed shows so people could identify shows with excessive violence, sexual content and obscene language. "A complementary.
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