Abstract
The Internet is claimed to be very democratic medium. Every person can transmit and receive wide variety of information at the very low cost. But this causes the "flood" of problematic expression including pornography and hate speech as well. This article first sketches the various efforts to control these information by countries and an international organization including the United States, the European Union, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Singapore and Japan. The United States has chosen to suppress "indecent" expression on line by law, namely "Communications Decency Act of 1996." The constitutionality of the Act was immediately challenged in courts. Two of the federal district courts ruled the law unconstitutional, and the Supreme Court is expected to reveal its opinion by this summer. In contrast Japanese Ministry of Telecommunications is planning to avoid legal restriction and to give private Internet-related organizations the primary responsibility for settling the complaints from the Internet users. In addition, the Ministry is encouraging to develop practical filtering software that screens content that is harmful to minors. It is afraid, however, that the government might exert substantial control over the problem in terms of providing "guidelines" that "lacks" any legal effect but has de facto binding power in a society like Japanese. The article concludes by pointing out the doctrinal issues underlying the content restriction in the cyberspace. (1) In a society where all of the effective communicative tools are virtually monopolized by the mass media, the Internet has superior constitutional value considering its highly democratic character. (2) The protection of minors provides good reason to restrict harmful content in theory, but this type of restriction usually turns out to be unconstitutionally overbroad constraint in practice. The legal protection of children may become unnecessary with installation of proper filtering mechanism. (3) As suggested above, "voluntary restraint" may have strong restrictive power due to the nature of the society, and warrants close constitutional analysis.
