CONCLUSION The CDA represents the kind of "top-down," government-centered attempt to regulate the content that demonstrates a lack of understanding of the nature of this new medium. Legislation like the CDA -- particular when based on regulatory approaches for wholly different media -- are certain to create more practical and constitutional problems than they solve. It is especially ironic that the Exon amendment, which would chill the development of online services and communities and "dumb down" the content of the Net's public spaces to a grade-school level, has been attached to a bill deregulating communications infrastructure. This deregulation has been presented as a boost to the pace of development of the very technology to support these services and communities. EFF believes that parents, not Congress or the FCC, have the primary right and responsibility to determine what is appropriate for their children to see. Furthermore, it is clearly wrong for Congress to attempt to make outlaws out of adults for engaging in public speech that may not be suitable for minors. As Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter ruled in Butler v. Michigan (1957): "The State insists that, by thus quarantining the general reading public against books not too rugged for grown men and women in order to shield juvenile innocence, it is exercising its power to promote the general welfare. Surely this is to burn the house to roast the pig. The incidence of this enactment is to reduce the adult population of Michigan to reading only what is fit for children." And a legislative approach that was bad for the adult population of Michigan nearly 40 years ago is surely just as bad for the adult population of the Net today. For More Information Contact: Electronic Frontier Foundation Mike Godwin Shari Steele (voice) +1.202.861.7700 ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]