They viewed the Internet as a hobbyists’ playground, no bigger deal than ham radio. Indeed, in early 1996, I was on a panel in Washington, D.C., with AT&T’s then CEO Bob Allen, during which he called the Internet "a toy." I predicted that persisting in that belief would cost him his job. It turned out to be worse than that. Today, AT&T barely exists, an outcome that seemed about as likely then as the collapse of the Soviet Union did in 1985.

But, wrong as these forces may have been, they had the money. Like their railroad baron predecessors, they had purchased Congress, seduced the president, and convinced the vice president that the whole nasty project was his idea.

They weren’t dumb, these guys. Indeed, they remain some of the smartest people I’ve ever met. But you can only be as smart as the framework of your reality permits. And they—or, more to the point, the organizations, institutions, habits of mind, legal systems, and social practices of which they were manifestations—had created a box that was hard to think themselves out of.

To the extent that they took the Internet seriously, they generally regarded it as a threat—a hot zone of sexual perversion, anarchy, terrorism, and bad manners. And yet they assumed it was also somehow American, like, say, the Panama Canal had been to a previous generation of Big Americans. We built it. It’s ours. We can run it. Our laws apply to all those who use it.

Operating on these two assumptions, Congress created the ironically named Telecommunications Reform Act, which contained within it the Communications Decency Act.

This stunningly dumb bit of legislation had passed in the Senate with only five dissenting votes. It aspired to make it unlawful, and punishable by a $250,000 fine, to say "shit" online. Or, for that matter, to say any of the seven other dirty words prohibited in American broadcast media. Or to discuss abortion openly. Or to talk about bodily functions in any but the most clinical terms.

It attempted to place more restrictive constraints on the conversation in Cyberspace than functionally existed in the Senate cafeteria, where I had dined a few times and overheard many colorful indecencies.

Nonetheless, Congress declared that the American government had the right—not to mention the even more improbable ability—to penalize and erase whatever Internet-distributed human expression some rube from Bug Tussle, Oklahoma, thought might transgress his cultural comfort zone. The fines were heavy. The language was vague. The limits of jurisdiction and procedures for enforcement were unclear at best.

Most of the people who voted for it had never touched a keyboard in their lives; that being something cute li’l staffers did. Indeed, one of the only wired solons on Capitol Hill, Senator Patrick Leahy, had this to say at the time:

Maybe those who are on the Internet ought to ask their Members of the House or the Senate, do they use it? Do they understand it? Do they understand the computer? I do not want to ask them if they know how to do really technical things, like programming a VCR. Ask them if they can turn on the Internet? Can they actually talk with each other? And if they cannot, maybe Internet users ought to tell their Members, "Then leave us alone. Leave us alone."

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