Speech without Romance:  Public Choice and the First Amendment, 105 Harv.  L. Rev. 554, 574 n.86 (1991) (noting that traditional public fora “are often the only place where less affluent groups and individuals can effectively express their message"); Harry Kalven, Jr., The Concept of the Public Forum:  Cox v.  Louisiana, 1965 Sup.  Ct.  Rev. 1, 30 ("[T]he parade, the picket, the leaflet, the sound truck, have been the media of communication exploited by those with little access to the more genteel means of communication.").  Similarly, given the existence of message boards and free Web hosting services, a speaker can, via the Internet, address the public, including patrons of public libraries, for little more than the cost of Internet access.  As the Supreme Court explained in Reno v.  ACLU, 521 U.S. 844 (1997), “the Internet can hardly be considered a ‘scarce’ expressive commodity.  It provides relatively unlimited, low-cost capacity for communication of all kinds.”  Id. at 870.  Although the cost of a home computer and Internet access considerably exceeds the cost of a soapbox or a few hundred photocopies, speakers wishing to avail themselves of the Internet may gain free access in schools, workplaces, or the public library.  As Professor Lessig has explained:  The “press” in 1791 was not the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.  It did not comprise large organizations of private interests, with millions of readers associated with each organization.  Rather, the press then was much like the Internet today.  The cost of a printing press was low, the readership was slight, and anyone (within reason) could become a publisher – and in fact an extraordinary number did.  When the Constitution speaks of the rights of the “press,” the architecture it has in mind is the architecture of the Internet.

Lawrence Lessig, Code 183 (1999).  While public libraries’ provision of Internet access shares many of the speech-promoting qualities of traditional public fora, it also facilitates speech in ways that traditional public fora cannot.  In particular, whereas the architecture of real space limits the audience of a pamphleteer or soapbox orator to people within the speaker’s immediate vicinity, the Internet renders the geography of speaker and listener irrelevant:  Through the use of chat rooms, any person with a phone line can become a town crier with a voice that resonates farther than it could from any soapbox.  Through the use of Web pages, mail exploders, and newsgroups, the same individual can become a pamphleteer.

Reno, 521 U.S. at 870 .  By providing patrons with Internet access, public libraries in effect open their doors to an unlimited number of potential speakers around the world, inviting the speech of any member of the public who wishes to communicate with library patrons via the Internet.  Due to the low costs for speakers and the irrelevance of geography, the volume of speech available to library patrons on the