I will address several of the more important of these questions, including the following: "How do we keep indecent material from minors?," "How do we protect authors of original material from having their creation spread all over the world for everyone to copy?," and "How do we create a system where people that libel other individuals anonymously on the Internet can be prosecuted for their crime?" It is questions like these that our world has had to face in the past two to three years since the Internet has come into the foreground

             A work of this length would have a great difficulty trying to exhaustively address every angle and issue involved in media law and the effects that the internet has upon it, and instead must give a cursory overview of several main issues in the forefront of today's legal news.

             II. The Internet and Obscenity.

             A. Brief Overview Of The Communications Decency Act of 1996 and The Child Online Protection Act (CDA 2).

             In 1996, Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996.(Telecommunications Act, 1996) The purpose of this act was "To promote competition and reduce regulation in order to secure lower prices and higher quality services for American telecommunications consumers and encourage the rapid deployment of new telecommunications technologies."(Telecommunications Act, 1996) In and of itself, the act was intended to create healthy competition in the new, fast-emerging, unregulated market that the Internet, cable television, and telephone companies had helped to create. It was also to help foster fair competition in this new market. .

             It is Section 5 of this act that gets the most attention, however. Section 5 is also known as The Communications Decency Act of 1996. The CDA attempted to restrict all people, regardless of age, from creating, viewing and transmitting "indecent" material via the Internet. Indecent speech is defined as "material that may be sexually graphic but is protected by the First Amendment.