The CDA was the Stamp Act of the Net. It forced the digital culture to see itself as a separate entity, and to defend the freedoms, privileges, and traditions it has patched together in recent years. It made clear that the values characterizing the Net are profoundly different than those governing much of the country. It united a fractious, fragmented, diverse collection of individuals, businesses, and communities in a way that had never occurred before, and might not have been possible without the dunderheaded political posturing of our elected leaders. When tens of thousands of black Web pages went up earlier this year in protest of the CDA, a new kind of political community was born.
Revolutions are easy to preach, but hard to carry out.
The CDA provided the Net and Web communities with an urgent need to defend a shared belief - that information wants to be free. For now, at least, that principle has been established as a defining value of the online community. Like the British taxes on tea and other imports, the CDA gave the digital world a sense of itself as a separate nation. Journalists have tragically failed in recent years to make the vital connection between free speech for the press and free speech for rappers, children, TV producers, and the digital world. Instead, they have created a climate in which these new media have been viewed as dangerous or destructive and in need of censorship and control.