95. Because of the realities of the Internet, the Act effects a total ban on certain constitutionally protected speech to adults. The Act reduces discourse on major portions of the Internet to that which is appropriate for a young child.

96. Virtually all of the tens of millions of users of the Internet -- except those who at all times stand mute in the discourse that occurs on the Internet -- are content providers who are subject to the terms of the Act. An individual is a content provider subject to the Act if he sends a single e-mail, or participates in a listserv discussion, or contributes to a USENET newsgroup, or responds to a survey on the World Wide Web, or establishes a personal "home page" on the Web, or converses with a friend through a real time service, or simply places a file in a publicly available area of a computer or network.

97. In other words, virtually any use of the Internet makes someone a content provider subject to the criminal penalties of the Act. Commercial content providers -- who typically require a credit card for users' payment -- may be able to use the credit card defense allowed by the Act. But for non- commercial content providers, who are responsible for a major part of communications on the Internet, there is no practical way the speaker can control who can access the message. Thus, for the vast majority of speech on the Internet, it is impossible for the speaker to prevent the speech from being "display[ed] in a manner available" to a person under 18. Act § 502(2).

98. Because of this impossibility, Section 502(2) of the Act effectively requires that almost all discourse on the Internet be at a level suitable for young children. This provision has the effect of a flat ban on an entire category of constitutionally protected speech between adults.

99. As used by millions of people daily, the primary methods to access information on the Internet do not permit individual or non-commercial content providers to control who on the Internet can access their content. From the perspective of the content provider, information that is publicly available on the Internet is available to all users of the Internet, even users who might be minors.

100. None of the major methods of accessing information -- including electronic mail, listservs, newsgroups, chat lines, telnet, ftp, gopher, and the World Wide Web -- has the ability to track the millions of individuals who access the Internet and screen out those who are under eighteen years of age. Although password-required access to content is possible (and is used in some circumstances), a password-access system would effectively remove from public access an enormous volume of valuable content on the Internet, and would reduce the information available to adults on the Internet to only content deemed suitable for minors.

101. The vast majority of content providers on the Internet are individuals who post messages to newsgroups and listservs, and who create content on the World Wide Web. Those individual content providers could not possibly create and maintain a database of specific Internet users who request access to the content and who prove they are 18 or older. Nor could individuals or other non-commercial content providers practically administer or economically afford an instantaneous credit card verification system. Such a requirement would effectively preclude any communications by those content providers that could be deemed "indecent" or "patently offensive" for minors.

102. Even larger organizations that provide content on the Internet cannot practically or economically track the millions of Internet users to determine whether those users are minors or adults.

103. Moreover, even if pre-registration by content users were practically or economically possible, the value of the content would be dramatically diminished because so few content users would anticipate the need to pre-register for a particular site. A huge percentage of Internet traffic is by users engaged in spontaneous and unpredictable research or searches for content, and a pre-registration requirement would effectively end this type of search.

104. As described above, the World Wide Web is a spontaneous and serendipitous communications medium, in which a user can jump from site to site to site depending on what content looks most useful or interesting, without any pre-registration or advance request. Requiring pre-registration for all sites that might contain content arguably covered by the Act (if such pre- registration were practically possible) would drastically reduce the usefulness of the World Wide Web.