Just when you thought the Internet was safe from government censorship, Sen. Dan Coats has introduced a sequel to the notorious Communications Decency Act. The bill punishes commercial distributors of material that's "harmful to minors" with six months in jail and a $50,000 fine. Unlike the original CDA, it applies only to web sites -- not to chatrooms, newsgroups, or email. Like the original CDA, it's certain to be controversial. Sen. Coats (R-Indiana), chief GOP sponsor of the original CDA, said his bill takes into account the Supreme Court's unanimous vote in June that struck down his first try. "I have studied the opinion of the Court and come before my colleagues today to introduce legislation that reflects the parameters laid out by the Court's opinion," he said on the Senate floor. (ftp://ftp.loc.gov/pub/thomas/c105/s1482.is.txt) Coats' brainchild is strikingly similar to (and in fact not as broad as) an ill-fated version of the first CDA that Rep. Rick White (R-Wash.) and the Center for Democracy and Technology embraced as a "compromise" in December 1995. Like Coats' bill, the White-CDT measure restricted material that was "harmful to minors." (http://www.epic.org/cda/hyde_letter.html) A Coats staffer said the measure requires adult pornographers to place images behind a firewall. "If you're involved in the commercial distribution of material that's harmful to minors, you have to take the bad stuff and put it on the other side of a credit card or PIN number," David Crane said. But the bill applies to more than just visual pornography. Its definition of material that could hurt minors includes any offensive sexual "communication" or "writing" without redeeming value. It applies to text-only web pages -- or bookstores that place sample chapters on the web. Since it covers anyone who "through the World Wide Web is engaged in the business of the commercial distribution of material that is harmful to minors," it could apply to Internet providers and online services as well. The FCC and the Department of Justice would be required to publish on their web sites "such information as is necessary to inform the public of the meaning of the term `material that is harmful to minors.'" Solveig Singleton, a lawyer at the Cato Institute, says: "The Supreme Court struggled for years to come up with a national defintion of obscenity. They failed. Harmful to minors is obscenity-lite. The FCC and Department of Justice won't have any luck coming up with a definition of obscenity-lite." Not a problem, predicts former porn-prosecutor Bruce Taylor, now the head of the National Law Center for Children and Families. "This bill will ensure that the hardcore pornographers don't get off the hook," he says. Next step for Coats is to attract co-sponsors and to forward his bill to the Senate Commerce committee. Some judges criticized Congress for holding no hearings on the original CDA; Coats isn't going to make that mistake again. "There will be a concerted effort to build a substantial legislative history," says David Crane. This bill won't be the end of Congressional interest in cyberporn. "You'll probably see other legislation come forward. Introducing this is not abandoning our other concerns," Crane says. -Declan