Cite as: 535 U. S. 564 (2002)
Kennedy, J., concurring in judgment
rad, 420 U. S. 546, 557 (1975). Indeed, when Congress purports to abridge the freedom of a new medium, we must be particularly attentive to its distinct attributes, for "differences in the characteristics of new media justify differences in the First Amendment standards applied to them." Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC, 395 U. S. 367, 386 (1969). The economics and the technology of each medium affect both the burden of a speech restriction and the Government's interest in maintaining it.
In this case the District Court found as a fact that "[o]nce a provider posts its content on the Internet and chooses to make it available to all, it generally cannot prevent that content from entering any geographic community." American Civil Liberties Union v. Reno, 31 F. Supp. 2d 473, 484 (ED Pa. 1999). By contrast, in upholding a ban on obscene phone messages, we emphasized that the speaker could "hire operators to determine the source of the calls or engag[e] with the telephone company to arrange for the screening and blocking of out-of-area calls or fin[d] another means for providing messages compatible with community standards." Sable, supra, at 125. And if we did not make the same point in Hamling, that is likely because it is so obvious that mailing lends itself to geographic restriction. (The Court has had no occasion to consider whether venue would be proper in "every hamlet into which [obscene mailings] may wander," Hamling, supra, at 144 (dissenting opinion), for the petitioners in Hamling did not challenge the statute as overbroad on its face.) A publisher who uses the mails can choose the location of his audience.
The economics and technology of Internet communication differ in important ways from those of telephones and mail. Paradoxically, as the District Court found, it is easy and cheap to reach a worldwide audience on the Internet, see 31 F. Supp. 2d, at 482, but expensive if not impossible to reach a geographic subset, id., at 484. A Web publisher in a community where avant garde culture is the norm may have no
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