A am not quite so cynical.

While I agree with you that COPA was useless, I believe that authors of this law are well-intentioned.

There is tremedous fear that people, if left to their own devices, will choose the path of hedonism and irresponsibilty.

It is this fear that drives our politicians to try to regulate everything, for our own good, of course.

Its also ineffective. Those porn-companies that would obey COPA are no threat – they dont try to ram their wares down every connection. And those that do employ the type of agresssive marketing that exposes children are not going to be stoped by a US law – they will just set up their servers elsewhere. Its completly useless – its intention was just to make a very public political show of being ‘tough on porn’ to win conservative votes.

We need to get rid of the first amendment. And then ban all internet traffic that originates from outside of the USA, because even if the law were to have passed muster, it still could only be enforced against US companies.

And remember too, the government conceded that their own studies show that “all but the worst performing (software) filters are far more effective than COPA would be at protecting children from sexually explicit material on the Web,”

And finally, filtering for content works because I, as a parent, can filter on my values, which may different that than the values of the parent down the street.