The Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA) was the United States Congress's first notable attempt to regulate pornographic material on the Internet. In the 1997 landmark case Reno v. ACLU, the United States Supreme Court unanimously struck the act's anti-indecency provisions. The Act is the short name of Title V of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, as specified in Section 501 of the 1996 Act. Senators James Exon and Slade Gorton introduced it to the Senate Committee of Commerce, Science, and Transportation in 1995. The amendment that became the CDA was added to the Telecommunications Act in the Senate by an 81–18 vote on June 15, 1995. As eventually passed by Congress, Title V affected the Internet (and online communications) in two significant ways. First, it attempted to regulate both indecency (when available to children) and obscenity in cyberspace. Second, Section 230 of title 47 of the U.S. Code, part of a codification of the Communications Act of 1934 (Section 9 of the Communications Decency Act / Section 509 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996) has been interpreted to mean that operators of Internet services are not publishers (and thus not legally liable for the words of third parties who use their services). Anti-indecency and anti-obscenity provisions The act's most controversial portions were those relating to indecency on the Internet. The relevant sections were introduced in response to fears that Internet pornography was on the rise. Indecency in TV and radio broadcasting had already been regulated by the Federal Communications Commission: broadcasting of offensive speech was restricted to hours of the day when minors were supposedly least likely to be exposed, and violators could be fined and lose their licenses. But the Internet had only recently been opened to commercial interests by the 1992 amendment to the National Science Foundation Act and thus had not been taken into consideration by previous laws. The CDA, which affected both the Internet and cable television, marked the first attempt to expand regulation to these new media. Passed by Congress on February 1, 1996, and signed by President Bill Clinton on February 8, 1996, the CDA imposed criminal sanctions on anyone who It further criminalized the transmission of "obscene or indecent" materials to persons known to be under 18. Free speech advocates worked diligently and successfully to overturn the portion relating to indecent, but not obscene, speech. They argued that speech protected under the