Should The Government Regulate The Internet?

" Benjamin Franklin, one of the Framers of the U.S. Constitution, once said, ""Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."" In the twenty-first century, equal access to the internet has become a cornerstone of life, an essential part of every single day. If we allow the internet to become regulated, by any means, then we are giving up something that has become an essential liberty to the people of the United States.

The internet has become a platform for various forms of speech, a new way of communication that connects the entire world within seconds. As the internet has become a new form of speech, the First Amendment right to Freedom of Speech must, therefore, apply to the internet. Just as the protections of the First Amendment were extended to symbolic speech in the 1989 U.S. Supreme Court case Texas v Johnson so to must these protections be extended to content found on the internet. The U.S. Supreme Court recognized that there are various forms that speech may take on, whether it

The instant that the government is able to regulate internet content, then the first steps away from democracy have been taken. The ability to monitor and regulate internet content would allow a form of government censorship that has been struck down by previous U.S. Supreme Court cases such as the 1971 case of The NY Times Co. v. The United States in which the court sided with the NY Times and found that the government was not allowed to regulate publications because it disagreed with the content. The internet has become an important source of news for individuals. Papers and magazines have been replaced by online articles and news sites and as a result, any form of regulation by the government would be in violation of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in The NY Times Co. v. The United