Recent attempts to address the concern include the Communications Decency Act of 1996, in which Congress decided what indecent speech is on the Internet and then assigned criminal charges to its dissemination. In 1997, the Supreme Court overturned this attempt by Congress to control information by stating that it was a violation of the First Amendment. Yet, in 1998, there was renewed support in both houses for legislation that would require schools and libraries to install filters on their computers. The issue is being tested in the courts. In Livermore, California, the parents of a teenager who accessed pornographic material on a library's computer and then saved the files on disk to print out to share with friends has sued the library for not protecting the boy and allowing him access to pornography.
Schools are also the target of lawsuits.
Last year, in a case now pending in federal court for the southern district of Florida in Palm Beach, a mother sued the Broward County School Board for unfiltered access to the Internet. She demanded filters for Internet-capable public school computers. Even legitimate sites can contain inappropriate material since Internet Service Providers are not responsible for what their subscribers put online. A decision by the U.S. Supreme Court reinforced a lower court ruling that prevents ISPs such as America Online from being sued for information posted by subscribers. Yet these issues aren't clear cut or seen the same way elsewhere in the world.