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Determining Place Regulations in Cyberspace:
Any content-based regulation of the Internet, no matter how benign the purpose, could burn the global village to roast the pig.
The Internet is a far more speech-enhancing medium than print, the village green, or the mails (ACLU v. Reno, 929 F. Supp. 824 (E.D.Pa. 1996).Burning the Global Village to Roast the Pig John S. Gossett and Tami Sutcliffe (C) 2007 University of North Texas Next - Development of Place Regulations For more than a century the U.S. Supreme Court has permitted government entities (e.g., villages, towns, cities, states, the nation) to impose time, place, and manner regulations on expression as long as those regulations met certain criteria (Gossett, 1986). Traditionally, public forum doctrine has defined the limits of protected expression required for speakers using government-owned spaces based on measurable physical characteristics, and existing U.S. public forum doctrine is grounded in a sense of physical location. In the late 19th century, state ownership and control over public spaces such as streets and parks was generally accepted because of the obvious practicality: We cannot all march in the same park on the same morning. In 1897, in the famous Boston Common case, the Court upheld the constitutionality of a Boston ordinance requiring a permit to speak and established the principle that government owned the highways and public parks and, therefore, could regulate their use (Davis v. Massachusetts, 167 U.S. 43). The concept of a limited resource being fairly distributed to all has been widely applied from parade permits to television broadcasting limitations, while the definitions of government-owned spaces has evolved over time to include three tiers: (1) non-public locations such as prisons, military bases, polling places, a school district's internal mail system, and airport terminals; (2) limited public forums including university meeting facilities, municipal theaters, and school board meeting rooms; and (3) traditional public forums, generally held to be publicly accessible locations such as streets, sidewalks, and parks (Perry Education Association v. Perry Local Educators' Association, 460 U.S. 37 [1983]; Tedford & Herbeck [2005], pp. 269-277). Nonpublic forums have been and continue to be heavily regulated, with states exercising control. Limited public forums tend to be regulated based on the nature of the physical property itself. The history of use of a given physical space helps decide whether citizens may use these physical areas for public speech and determines how and when this activity can be carried out. Usually, the practical considerations of the tangible facility are central: Will this free speech use of this space cause any inconvenience for anyone else? |