Here's a headline from the L.A. Times ...
Hey FCC, let parents be the Internet censors
By David Lazarus
Kevin Martin, the agency's chief, wants to provide free wireless access, but he wants it filtered for porn and other objectionable material. That's not the job of the government.

I didn't read the whole article but enough to know that Lazrus is living in a dream world. I wrote him the following:

Dear Mr. Lazarus,
Your article concerning the First Amendment and the internet troubles me. When the First Amendment was drafted, the framers did not, could not, envision the information technology explosion that can reach any vulnerable child, teenager or dysfunctional adult. The First Amendment needs to be brought into the 21st Century.

It is a joke to think parents can monitor their children to the degree that it would take to offset not only offensive, but dangerous material, that can be absorbed by impressionable youngsters. No more than you should put a child into a room full of pedophiles, should you expose them to such material freely and without sanction or preventive measures.

Yes there are technological ways to keep such material from surfacing on one's computer but I know many families where only the children understand the technology. You are probably too young to remember or appreciate the virtues of childhood innocence, before we had such instant access to the seamy side of life. The 30s were hard times but children, by and large, did not have despicable role models and ways of life at their disposal and fewer of them acted out in dangerous ways by copying acts of seeming rebellion and anger toward the establishment or their parents. We're not going to totally prevent instant pernicious knowledge but we don't have to aid and abet it.

Please take another look at this from both sides and consider the argument of Oliver Wendell Holmes concerning free speech ...

Holmes, writing for a unanimous majority, ruled that it was illegal to distribute flyers opposing the draft during World War I. Holmes argued this abridgment of free speech was permissible because it presented a "clear and present danger" to the government's recruitment efforts for the war. Holmes wrote:

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. [...] The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.

***

xx, Teal