“Governments of the Industrial World,” the Declaration began, “you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”
It was February 9, 1996, and Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow sat at his computer in Davos, Switzerland, fuming. Just days earlier, Congress has passed the mammoth Telecommunications Act. The bill revolutionized Federal telecom policy in about a dozen areas, but what made headlines was a subsection of the law called the Communications Decency Act. The CDA stipulated that anyone who “knowingly” used an interactive computer service to display to someone under 18 any kind of message or image that, “in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards, sexual or excretory activities or organs, regardless of whether the user of such service placed the call or initiated the communication” could receive a two year federal prison sentence or a hefty fine.
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