the library’s print collection.  Unless a library allows access to only those sites that have been preselected as having particular value, a method that, as noted above, was tried and rejected by the Westerville Ohio Public Library, see supra at 46-47, even a library that uses software filters has opened its Internet collection “for indiscriminate use by the general public.”  Perry Educ.  Ass’n v.  Perry Local Educs.  Ass’n, 460 U.S. 37, 47 (1983). “[M]ost Internet forums – including chat rooms, newsgroups, mail exploders, and the Web – are open to all comers.”  Reno v.  ACLU, 521 U.S. 844, 880 (1997).

The fundamental difference between a library’s print collection and its provision of Internet access is illustrated by comparing the extent to which the library opens its print collection to members of the public to speak on a given topic and the extent to which it opens its Internet terminals to members of the public to speak on a given topic.  When a public library chooses to carry books on a selected topic, e.g. chemistry, it does not open its print collection to any member of the public who wishes to write about chemistry.  Rather, out of the myriad of books that have ever been written on chemistry, each book on chemistry that the library carries has been reviewed and selected because the person reviewing the book, in the exercise of his or her professional judgment, has deemed its content to be particularly valuable.  In contrast, when a public library provides Internet access, even filtered Internet access, it has created a forum open to any member of the public who writes about chemistry on the Internet, regardless of how unscientific the author’s methods or of how patently false the author’s conclusions are, regardless of the author’s reputation or grammar, and regardless of the reviews of the scientific community.  Notwithstanding protestations in CIPA’s legislative history to the contrary, members of the general public do define the content that public libraries make available to their patrons through the Internet.  Any member of the public with Internet access could, through the free Web hosting services available on the Internet, tonight jot down a few musings on any subject under the sun, and tomorrow those musings would become part of public libraries’ online offerings and be available to any library patron who seeks them out.

In providing its patrons with Internet access, a public library creates a forum for the facilitation of speech, almost none of which either the library’s collection development staff or even the filtering companies have ever reviewed.  Although filtering companies review a portion of the Web in classifying particular sites, the portion of the Web that the filtering companies actually review is quite small in relation to the Web as a whole.  The filtering companies’ harvesting process, described in our findings of fact, is intended to identify only a small fraction of Web sites for