Indecency Bill aimed also at the Internet

"Octogenarian Republican Senator Ted Stevens and his committee are considering an "indecency" bill cooked up in the wake of the furor over Janet Jackson’s boob flash during the Super Bowl. And now, the weighty senator wants to extend its provisions.

" Thunders the senator: “We ought to find some way to say, here is a block of channels, whether it’s delivered by broadband, by VoIP, by whatever it is, to a home..."

" From the ACLU to libertarian conservatives, predictions of what the Stevens proposals mean are dire. "I think Stevens is probably laying the groundwork for another assault on speech online,” Adam Thierer, a senior fellow at the libertarian, free-market Progress & Freedom Foundation. "He’s obviously pointing the way to other members of Congress, saying that if they want to control the media, they have to start at cable and satellite first, and then target the Internet . . . This foreshadows the coming debate we’ll have over IP-enabled services in the video space."