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Three justices—John Paul Stevens, David Souter, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg—dissented from the Supreme Court decision. Their dissents drew attention to the three-judge court’s description of the perils of filtering, and to the delays and other burdens that make discretionary disabling a poor substitute for uncensored Internet access. Souter objected to Rehnquist’s analogy between filters and library book selection, arguing that filtering is actually more akin to “buying an encyclopedia and then cutting out pages.” Stevens noted that censorship is not necessarily constitutional just because it is a condition of government funding—especially when funded programs are supposed to facilitate free expression, as in universities and libraries.
After the Supreme Court upheld CIPA, public libraries confronted a stark choice—forgo federal aid for Internet connections, including e-rate discounts, or invest resources in a filtering system that censors large quantities of valuable material. Public schools, not having challenged CIPA, confronted this dilemma from the moment the law was enacted. But because of local political pressures, most school districts had already bought into filtering. As one school official frankly noted: “It would be politically disastrous for us not to filter. All the good network infrastructure we’ve installed would come down with the first instance of an elementary school student accessing some of the absolutely raunchy sites out there.”
This administrator’s observation points up the high political stakes in the filtering debate. On the one hand, filters are highly effective, if often irrational, censorship tools, blatantly aimed at suppressing information and ideas. On the other hand, political leaders and the general public continue to express fears about minors’ access to pornography or other presumably inappropriate speech online.
There is no simple answer to this political dilemma, which has produced a financial windfall for filtering company executives.