[The text below is a complete transcript of Cohen's remarks following Ira Magaziner's keynote presentation at the conference on Democracy and Digital Mediaheld at MIT on May 8-9, 1998.]

I thought I'd make things more boring, not exactly by agreeing with Ira Magaziner. When he finished, I thought that what I would end up saying was something not that different, although maybe a little bit louder, and less articulate, with a different emphasis, and less informed. Then, when I listened to Ben talk, I knew I would be less articulate. Same basic principles, although somehow I didn't draw the same conclusions from them.

I come at this issue from two angles. First of all, I come to it as a political theorist, who's written on issues of democracy and freedom of expression, and in writing about those issues, tried to combine egalitarian concerns about fair access with strongly libertarian hostility to content regulation. Combining those commitments strikes me as the problem. I also come at these issues as a Web-provider. For three years, the full text of all issues of "Boston Review" has been on the Web. Apart from being a top 5%, we are ranked #7 among magazines by "Lycos"; we're tied with "Slate" and "Salon." We've got about l00,000 Web readers a year, which is about 20 times our paper readership.

So what I'd like to do in responding to Ira's talk is to try to put these--I'm mixing metaphors here--to try to put these two hats together. I've tried to combine these two perspectives on these issues. In general terms--here's where I think I agree with Ben--I start with a different question. So Ira's question was, "how can we combine the traditional libertarian culture of the Internet with the commercial and governmental culture?" My question is, "how can we preserve democratic, political culture in this environment? " I think that is a different question from the libertarian-commercial-governmental question.

The first story--file this under the issue of "Access." I said that we've got about l00,000 readers a year and #7 in "Lycos" magazine rankings. We never spent a dime to get that many paper readers. It would have cost us many hundreds of thousands of dollars to get that many paper readers. If we did well, it probably would cost a couple of million bucks. We didn't spend a dime. It was donated labor, donated computers and donated Ethernet connections. The site was originally set up by a very brilliant MIT graduate student, who had also been a brilliant MIT undergraduate before that, who said about three years ago, "Why don't we just put this stuff up on the Web and see what happens?" And he set up the Web-site. Then it was administered by another terrific MIT graduate student. That's the access-story. It's been a terrific success, and we didn't spend a dime on it.

Another content story. I occasionally do searches of "Boston Review" and some particular author on the web. Recently, I looked for "Boston Review" and Susan Okum, who had written a very interesting article for us on issues about feminism and multiculturalism. I found that a couple of paragraphs from Susan's article were located on a David Duke, White Nationalist Web-site, because they really liked the idea that a white feminist was attacking, as they saw it, multiculturalism. They thought that was really terrific. Then I actually found it on several connected sites. There are some Canadian sites as well.

The next story contrasts two book deals. In l996 the "Review" published a book through Beacon Press called, For Love of Country, and when we published the book with Beacon, Beacon insisted, indeed, it was part of the contract that all of the articles that had originally been in the magazine had to be removed from the Web-site. And they were really dog-on-a-bone about making sure that they were removed from the Web-site because this is when book publishers thought that the Web was going to kill publishing. Nineteen-ninety-nine, next year, we're publishing four books with Beacon Press and one book with Princeton University Press, and they're all welcoming our keeping all the texts of all the articles up on the Web-site because they now understand that the Web is like going into a bookstore and browsing. It's not a killer for booksales. I mean, it may be when people all have cable connections and 32-page per minute printers at home, but, for now, anyway there's been a change of attitude on that.

OK, those are the stories. File the last one under "Cautionary Tales."

The first principle, which the Clinton Administration has come around to this view, is don't restrict content; don't restrict topics; don't restrict viewpoints. And you might ask about this commitment. Why not restrict content? Isn't some speech, including at least some of the speech on the Web, harmful, offensive, injurious, disgusting? Well, there are two reasons for not restricting speech. First of all--though it's true that lots of speech is injurious and harmful--open expression is essential to democracy. And secondly, as Brandeis pointed out a long time ago, if you're really concerned about the harms that result from speech, there are two ways that you can address those harms. One is that you can regulate its content; and the other is that you can promote more speech. So Brandeis said, the best way to combat the harms of speech is with more speech. So that's the presumptive way to combat harms. Brandeis' point is a very important point. If you're concerned about combating the harms of speech, you need more speech. But, then, we need to draw a distinction here--a distinction between restricting speech on grounds of its content, shutting it down, and fostering speech on important issues because of its essential role in democracy. So the first principle is that if you condemn content regulation because of Brandeis' principle that the best way of combating the harms of speech is with more speech, then you need to ensure that there is more speech out there to combat those harms. Now there's a big question about how to do that--I'll come back to that later on. The key point here is that you need to ensure that there is speech to combat the harms of speech, and there's no guarantee that the market provides that, including this particular market.

Related to this principle about not restricting content--it's a subordinate principle--is, in particular, don't restrict speech for adults in order to protect children unless the restriction is unavoidable. Why not? Well, first of all--a now-familiar refrain--there's the substantial cost of speech restrictions to adults, among others, the cost of restricting democracy. Moreover, I think that lots of adult squeamishness masks as solicitude for children. It's fine to say you're really trying to protect children. I suspect that a lot of that protecting of children really, as I say, is a mask for squeamishness on the part of adults. I mean, I have an eight-year old and a twelve-year old and, very frankly, the hardest problem I have had in the last year is not with my kids looking at bestiality-sites on the Web, it's with trying to explain what presidential knee-pads are. It's true.

"Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was, at first, and is still vulgarly held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society, itself, is the tyrant, society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it, its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates. And if it is used wrong, mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all on things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough. There needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the tendency of society to impose by means other than civil penalties its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them to fetter the development and, if possible, prevent the formation of any individuality not in harmony with its ways and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence and to find that limit and maintain it against encroachment is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs as protection against political despotism."

That's the best criticism I've read of the idea that the best way to substitute for the Communication Decency Act is with a bunch of software filters produced by private producers. We shouldn't condemn content regulation by government, and then welcome all the proliferating schemes of private regulation; proliferating schemes like X-Stop, which used to be used until the court stepped in by a Virginia library and that blocked access to the Quakers, the American Association of University Women, and Zero Population Growth, and I assume, to come back to my story, it probably blocked access to the "Boston Review" because of the presence of the article by Carrie Freed, "Lesbian Fiction." Also, if not X-Stop, then filters that are concerned with hate speech probably blocked access to the hate sites that included Susan Okum's article, denying people, I think, what is really a profound insight about the article and about those organizations. So if speech is fundamental to a democracy, then private regulation is not a cause for enthusiasm.

That's one broad set of principles.

So if you want to foster the citizen-role, it's important not to just give people access in the form of literacy--they can download stuff--it's also important to encourage access by providing resources to people who lack such. That means equipment, training and support staffs, for, for example, the kind of community networks that Doug is involved in. You might also require--you might--that is, our government might also, for example, require sites to carry links to other sites that have less traffic; it might provide a non-commercial search engine with quick updating for new sites that aren't already hooked into the current linkage networks. Indeed, if you do that, and here I come back to an earlier point, if you provide fair access, not just in the form of being able to download, but in the form of being able to put content up--Kapor's whole point. That's the best way to deal with the promoting more speech to combat the harms of speech. You give fair access to people and you don't have to worry about the diversity of ideas on the 'Net. People will provide them for themselves. The government doesn't have to worry about making sure that the full spectrum of ideas is covered. All the government has to do is to ensure that people have fair access. Then you can take care of Brandeis' point--combating the harms of speech with more speech. Don't regulate content. Ensure fair access.

So promote fair access, yes. Don't regulate content. Make sure that the bad messages are answered with other messages, not by shutting them down. But whatever we do, be careful and attentive to the fact that this medium is changing incredibly fast and that restrictive regulations are likely to be, at best, irrelevant very quickly and, at worst, extremely damaging. (APPLAUSE)