In fact, beginning with the invention of moveable type and the printing press, every change has generated enthusiasm for its liberating potential and fears about its damaging effects. While public discourse can be facilitated and controlled by new technologies, the issues of obscenity, indecency, defamation, access, freedom of information, fighting words, hate speech, privacy, and intellectual property rights remain. The constitutional issues are not, however, unlike those related to other mass media. Obscenity, despite its convoluted jurisprudence, remains a crime outside the protection of the First Amendment. Most prosecutions for obscenity are under state statutes, but the transborder transmissions of Internet can raise questions of jurisdiction and involve the federal government in the same manner that do postal, telephone, broadcast, or cable transmission of obscene communication.
Indecency presents more interesting questions and responses.
Sexual and scatological messages might be offenses to some, or even most, audiences, but Congressional efforts to prohibit and restrict such electronic communication have repeatedly encountered First Amendment barriers. The best solution for avoiding offensive communication is for adults to stop reading and delete any messages they do not wish to read and for parents and teachers to supervise the computing activities of children. Some private communications services have acted in this area, with Prodigy developing a program to screen specified words before reposting to its bulletin boards and CompuServe and America OnLine posting warning labels on certain of its bulletin boards. The apparent popularity of such alternative pornographic bulletin boards could present a problem by consuming excessive bandwidth, but fiber optics and the superhighway should avoid that condition before it becomes a reality. Although no such cases have reached the courts, it would most likely be dealt with on the same basis as have defamatory messages.