This new power for individuals to report what they observe and argue about those reports also threatens those whose power and fortunes depend on forcing a narrow agenda on others, zealots who believe they are in the possession of such ultimate moral certainty that they have the right to impose their ideas on others. The threat of uncontrollable communications among citizens, not the pornographic pictures or taboo words that a tiny portion of the online population publish, is why freedom of expression is under attack. It's about power. The reason these attacks on the First Amendment in cyberspace have been successful so far is that few people understand what the Internet is about. People are ignorant and fearful, and that makes them easy to dupe and manipulate.
Democracy is what's at stake.
It doesn't have anything to do with protecting children from pornography, because there are better ways to do that . It's about the power to determine what people are allowed to say, write and believe. It's not about obscenity. We already have a decades-old body of case law about obscenity. People need to understand that this is not about sex, it's about the foundations of democracy.