by Edwin Diamond and Stephen Bates

About the authors: Edwin Diamond is a journalist and the director of the News Study Group at New York University. Stephen Bates is a lawyer and a senior fellow at the Annenberg Washington Program in Communications Policy Studies, a nonpartisan think tank. They are coauthors of The Spot: The Rise of Political Advertising on Television.

Cyberenthusiasts sing the praises of the body electric, a global realm of freewheeling computer networks where speech is open and no restrictive rules apply. But because the Internet (“the Net”) exists within societies that have long-standing traditions and laws, its rapid assimilation into the “real world” is provoking tensions and confrontations that are now being played out in the legal domain.

Legislating Speech Restrictions on the Internet

In spring 1995, for example, the U...