The Washington Post, November 8, 1995. Return of the Cyber-Censors [Editorial] When the Senate passed its ill-advised "Exon amendment" to the telecommunications bill last spring, which would criminalize the transmission of obscene, pornographic or "indecent" material on the Internet, the measure got an overwhelming 84 votes, many of them from senators who didn't understand the implications of the move. Only a few weeks later, the House went even more overwhelmingly the other way, voting 420 to 4 for an amendment (co-sponsored by Reps. Ron Wyden and Christopher Cox) that would bar the Federal Communications Commission from regulating cyberspace and would instead make it legally easier for commercial Internet providers to use their own technical tools to regulate questionable material. The contrast was the result of a burst of public discussion in which more technologically astute members, including House Speaker Newt Gingrich, caught on to the disturbing fact that the kinds of far-reaching liability imposed by Sen. James Exon's formulation -- hastily adapted from an existing measure on telephone transmission -- would cripple practically any commercial Internet provider and effectively lame the new medium as a venue for moneymaking activity. Now these vastly different measures are in conference committee along with the rest of the telecommunications bill (in other areas of which, we remind readers once again, The Washington Post Co. has some interests). But the seeming clarity afforded by the House response to the Exon amendment and by Mr. Gingrich's appreciation of the need for untrammeled development of the new medium is nowhere to be seen. A letter from Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed, Phyllis Schlafly and other prominent spokesmen for the religious right is urging the conferees toward an Exon-style approach that's as destructive now as it ever was. The House bill also could end up including an amendment sponsored by Rep. Henry Hyde that adds some criminal liability to the transmission of obscene (but not "indecent") images via the new technologies. The argument against "criminalizing" the transmission of "indecent" images via the Internet remains stark and simple, and it goes not to the awfulness of child pornography or even to the ability of parents to control what their children do on the computer (a wide variety of off-the-shelf technological filters now exist that let parents do this themselves) but to the impossibility of regulation by the electronic middleman industries that are developing. Commercial providers such as America Online continue to pass along millions of messages a day, the interactive "newsgroups" unfold quickly and internationally, and the kind of central filtering envisioned by would-be regulators erases the very quality that makes the Internet a live and promising medium -- its inexpensive accessibility. If the Internet were like a telephone system, there would at least be the possibility of identifying a specific "sender" and "recipient." On the Internet it's "receivers" who do the selecting of what to look at and where. Giving those recipients the tools they need remains the way to go. The conferees should resist the urge to censor cyberspace.