The Indecent Communications Decency Act
In George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984 , the Ministry of Peace fights wars and the Ministry of Truth tells lies. In the United States, internet service providers are currently immune from prosecution for sex trafficking carried out by third parties who use their services. Why? Because of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, or CDA. To be fair to the drafters of the original legislation, they really did intend to clean up the Internet, which was a very different place in 1996 than it is today. Congress passed and President Clinton signed the CDA with the intention of making obscene or indecent web content illegal. But the following year, the U. S. Supreme Court agreed with the American Civil Liberties Union that the indecency restrictions violated the principle of free speech, and voided them. But the court let stand a part of the law called Section 230. Section 230 is a classic case of unintended consequences. What it does is to make internet service provider