John Ashcroft V. ACLU

            The proliferation of the Internet has created a new arena for the government to regulate. Passed in 1998, The Child Online Protection Act (COPA) was intended to keep minors from accessing harmful material on the World Wide Web. COPA relies on community standards to identify material to be banned from the Web. In John Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU contended that COPA is in violation of the First Amendment because it prevents adults from accessing material that they have a constitutional right to view. Lower courts agreed, including the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, which found fault with the community standards provision. The court maintained that the very nature of the Internet makes it impossible to restrict access to a site based on geographic location of the user. In a reversal of this view, the Supreme Court ruled with a majority of eight to one that COPA's reliance on community standards to judge obscenity harmful to children does not violate the First Amendment.
             Writing the majority opinion in this case was Justice Clarence Thomas. He defended Congress's attempt to tone down the Communications Decency Act, which was declared unconstitutional in Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union. While the CDA covered all aspects of the Internet including email, COPA applies only to material on the World Wide Web made "for commercial purposes."" Also, COPA only restricts "material that is harmful to minors- unlike the CDA, which covered the broader realm of all "indecent and patently offensive communications."" This opinion of the court asserted that COPA, by defining material harmful to minors in a parallel fashion to the court's definition of obscenity, would not restrict the wide range material Web in the way the Communications Decency Act had. In drawing up COPA, Congress used Miller v. California as a basis to define material harmful to minor as:.