Cite as: 518 U. S. 727 (1996)
Souter, J., concurring
hardly assume that standards for judging the regulation of one of them will not have immense, but now unknown and unknowable, effects on the others.4
Accordingly, in charting a course that will permit reasonable regulation in light of the values in competition, we have to accept the likelihood that the media of communication will become less categorical and more protean. Because we cannot be confident that for purposes of judging speech restrictions it will continue to make sense to distinguish cable from other technologies, and because we know that changes in these regulated technologies will enormously alter the structure of regulation itself, we should be shy about saying the final word today about what will be accepted as reasonable tomorrow. In my own ignorance I have to accept the real possibility that "if we had to decide today . . . just what the First Amendment should mean in cyberspace, . . . we would get it fundamentally wrong." Lessig, The Path of Cyberlaw, 104 Yale L. J. 1743, 1745 (1995).
The upshot of appreciating the fluidity of the subject that Congress must regulate is simply to accept the fact that not every nuance of our old standards will necessarily do for the new technology, and that a proper choice among existing doctrinal categories is not obvious. Rather than definitively settling the issue now, Justice Breyer wisely reasons by direct analogy rather than by rule, concluding that the speech and the restriction at issue in these cases may usefully be measured against the ones at issue in Pacifica.5 If
4 See, e. g., Lynch, Speedier Access: Cable and Phone Companies Compete, at http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/ bonus/cb006.htm (June 17, 1996) (describing cable modem technology); Gateway 2000 ships first Destination big screen TV-PC's, at http://www.gw2k.com/corpinfo/press/1996/ destin.htm (Apr. 29, 1996) (describing computer with both cable TV and Internet reception capability).
5 See, e. g., Sunstein, On Analogical Reasoning, 106 Harv. L. Rev. 741, 786 (1993) (observing that analogical reasoning permits "greater flexibility . . . over time"); Sullivan, Post-Liberal Judging: The Roles of Categorization and Balancing, 63 U. Colo. L. Rev. 293, 295, n. 6 (1992) (noting that
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