The Washington Post, October 27, 1995 Freedom of Net Speech (Editorial) Is speech on the Internet like speech in a public square, or is it more like speech in a privately owned mall, where leafleters and demonstrators need permission? And what about universities, where students using university accounts for e-mail and other messages may find themselves subjected to disciplinary rules? The latter problem occurred most recently at Virginia Tech, which has come under challenge for disciplining a student who sent a letter described as abusive to another student. The difficulty of framing such questions or even of defining the terms they're made up of (Is cyberspace really a "space," or just the ability of a lot of machines to talk to one another?) should be ample illustration of why millions of Internet users are still sloshing around in a state of legal ambiguity. And that ambiguity, though congenial to the anarchically inclined folks who have been in cyberspace since its not-very-remote beginnings, can't be sustained much longer as millions of users pile into cyberspace through commercial, university-owned and workplace hookups. The providers of these hookups all have an interest in what their users "say" to other users once they're on line, but the interests vary. Some providers are afraid -- with cause -- that they may be liable for pirated, libelous or other lawbreaking material posted on their accounts, or (depending on the outcome of assorted legislation) for transmitting pornographic or indecent material to minors. Universities have another set of motivations that go beyond fear of legal vulnerability and that have led many -- including Virginia Tech -- to institute student conduct policies that can be used to curb even non-cyberspace speech. Virginia Tech authorities say the existing student life policy prohibits "words or acts" that constitute "abusive conduct" that "demeans, intimidates, threatens or otherwise interferes with another person's rightful actions or comfort," whether on line or off. As with the notorious "hate speech" regulations at many campuses, this is a dangerously broad category, though the lines between interfering with someone's comfort and actually threatening him are probably drawable by a court. Technologically oriented civil liberties groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation have been arguing for some time that if First Amendment rights in cyberspace aren't codified and nailed down early, tendencies toward restraint will multiply to cover more and more of the new "sectors," and this will greatly reduce the potential of electronic communication both socially and commercially. An even more cold-eyed pragmatic argument is that speech restrictions, notoriously hard to enforce in the real world, are even more so in the virtual one: In one formulation much repeated by programmers, the Internet "interprets censorship as a malfunction and detours around it." Add this to the practical impossibility of commercial owners monitoring every message sent via cyberspace, and you have enforcement nightmares. There are better and broader arguments, though, for being skeptical of any efforts to restrict the content of cyberspace speech in ways that go beyond existing and permitted controls on real-world speech, whether on child pornography, stalking, libel or the rest. Universities have some wiggle room here, but for the same reason university "hate speech" codes or restrictions on what professors may say in class are a terrible idea, it's bad practice to restrict student speech on-line. Free speech is good for the Internet for the same reasons it's good for the real world. -----