| Sumario: | The Supreme Court overturned the Communications Decency Act in summer 1997, but there are now a host of more limited efforts afoot to cut back the range of Internet content and to limit access to various kinds of online material, and these new forms of control pose more subtle and incremental threats to free speech. This fact should force people to confront whether keeping the government out of censorship will be adequate to guarantee freedom online. The myopic focus on government as the singular or most important threat to free speech lies in a basic misreading of American history. The real pointed threats to free speech and free expression do not, and never have, come from government. Rather, they have always come from willful majorities determined on bullying dissenters into silence. The problem with the new information technology and content filtering is that they make this bullying even more feasible than it has been in the past. Content filtering and the Platform for Internet Content Selection used to regulate online information are discussed.
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