Opinion ID: 158478
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Do the CPNI regulations restrict speech?

Text: 23 As a threshold requirement for the application of the First Amendment, the government action must abridge or restrict protected speech. The government argues that the FCC's CPNI regulations do not violate or even infringe upon petitioner's First Amendment rights because they only prohibit it from using CPNI to target customers and do not prevent petitioner from communicating with its customers or limit anything that it might say to them. This view is fundamentally flawed. Effective speech has two components: a speaker and an audience. A restriction on either of these components is a restriction on speech. Cf. Virginia State Bd. of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, Inc., 425 U.S. 748, 756-57 (1976) (noting that the First Amendment protects the communication, whether the speech restriction applies to its source or impinges upon the audience's reciprocal right to receive the communication); Martin v. City of Struthers, 319 U.S. 141, 143 (1943) (noting the First Amendment embraces the right to distribute literature and necessarily protects the right to receive it). In other words, a restriction on speech tailored to a particular audience, targeted speech, cannot be cured simply by the fact that a speaker can speak to a larger indiscriminate audience, broadcast speech. 24 Perhaps the Supreme Court case of Florida Bar v. Went For It, Inc., 515 U.S. 618 (1995), best illustrates this. In Went For It, a lawyer referral service and an individual lawyer challenged a Florida Bar rule that prohibited attorneys from using direct mail advertisements to solicit wrongful death and personal injury clients within thirty days of the accident or disaster causing death or injury. See 515 U.S. at 620-21. Despite the fact that the attorney could indiscriminately mail solicitations for his services, the court found that the targeted speech constituted commercial speech and that the restriction on the targeted speech implicated the First Amendment. See id. at 623 3 ; see also Ficker v. Curran, 119 F.3d 1150, 1153-56 (4th Cir. 1997) (applying First Amendment analysis to direct mail solicitations by attorneys to criminal and traffic defendants); Revo v. Disciplinary Bd. of the Sup. Ct. for the State of N.M., 106 F.3d 929, 932-33 (10th Cir.) (determining that lawyer's direct mail advertising to personal injury victims and family members of wrongful death victims constituted protected commercial speech), cert. denied, 117 S. Ct. 2515 (1997). Therefore, the existence of alternative channels of communication, such as broadcast speech, does not eliminate the fact that the CPNI regulations restrict speech. 25