Cato Institute paper on "Lessons from FCC Regulation"

[Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 25 Mar 1997 07:30:50 -0800 (PST)
From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
To: fight-censorship-announce@vorlon.mit.edu
Subject: Cato Institute paper on "Lessons from FCC Regulation"

[I read through most of this paper last night. It doesn't say anything new
about the CDA per se, but it is worth reading for what it says about way
the Fairness Doctrine was used to intimidate political opponents, and how
government controls over the content of speech are intolerable. --Declan]

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   Linkname: 270. Chilling the Internet? Lessons from FCC
   Filename: http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-270es.html                 

                           CHILLING THE INTERNET?
             Lessons from FCC Regulation of Radio Broadcasting 

                   by Thomas W. Hazlett and David W. Sosa

                              Executive Summary

     Congress included the Communications Decency Act in the
     Telecommunications Act, which was signed into law on February 8,
     1996. The CDA sought to outlaw the use of computers and phone lines
     to transmit "indecent" material and provided jail terms and heavy
     fines for violators. Proponents of the act argue that it is
     necessary to protect minors from undesirable speech on the
     burgeoning Internet. The CDA was immediately challenged in court by
     the American Civil Liberties Union, and the special three-judge
     federal panel established to hear the case recently declared the
     act unconstitutional. Yet its ultimate adjudication remains in
     doubt.

     Ominously, the federal government has long experimented with
     regulations designed to improve the content of "electronic" speech.
     For example, the Fairness Doctrine, imposed on radio and television
     stations until 1987, was an attempt to establish a standard of
     "fair" coverage of important public issues. The deregulation of
     content controls on AM and FM radio programming, first under the
     Carter Federal Communications Commission in early 1981 and then
     under the Reagan FCC (which abolished the Fairness Doctrine in
     1987), led to profound changes in radio markets. Specifically, the
     volume of informational programming increased dramatically
     immediately after controls were ended--powerful evidence of the
     potential for regulation to have a "chilling effect" on free
     speech.

                                       *******

        Thomas W. Hazlett is a professor of agricultural and resource
     economics and director of the Program on Telecommunications Policy,
        University of California, Davis. David W. Sosa is a doctoral
      student in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics,
      University of California, Davis. This article originally appeared
      in the Michigan Telecommunications and Technology Law Review, an
              online journal, and is reprinted with permission.