Cite as: 535 U. S. 564 (2002)
Stevens, J., dissenting
the least tolerant communities find it harmful to minors.5 While the objective nature of the inquiry may eliminate any worry that the serious value determination will be made by the least tolerant community, it does not change the fact that, within the subset of images deemed to have no serious value for minors, the decision whether minors and adults throughout the country will have access to that speech will still be made by the most restrictive community.
Justice Kennedy makes a similar misstep, ante, at 592 (opinion concurring in judgment), when he ties the over-breadth inquiry to questions about the scope of the other provisions of the statute. According to his view, we cannot determine whether the statute is substantially overbroad based on its use of community standards without first determining how much of the speech on the Internet is saved by the other restrictions in the statute. But this represents a fundamental misconception of our overbreadth doctrine. As Justice White explained in Broadrick v. Oklahoma, 413 U. S.
5 The Court also notes that the limitation to communications made for commercial purposes narrows the category of speech as compared to the CDA, ante, at 569. While it is certainly true that this condition limits the scope of the statute, the phrase "commercial purposes" is somewhat misleading. The definition of commercial purposes, 47 U. S. C. § 231(e)(2)(B), covers anyone who generates revenue from advertisements or merchandise, regardless of the amount of advertising or whether the advertisements or products are related to the images that allegedly are harmful to minors. As the District Court noted: "There is nothing in the text of the COPA, however, that limits its applicability to so-called commercial pornographers only; indeed, the text of COPA imposes liability on a speaker who knowingly makes any communication for commercial purposes 'that includes any material that is harmful to minors,' " App. to Pet. for Cert. 52a. In the context of the Internet, this is hardly a serious limitation. A 1998 study, for example, found that 83 percent of Web sites contain commercial content. Lawrence & Giles, Accessibility of information of the web, 400 Nature 107-109 (1999); Guernsey, Seek—but on the Web, You Might Not Find, N. Y. Times, July 8, 1999, p. G3. Interestingly, this same study found that only 1.5 percent of the 2.8 million sites cataloged contained pornographic content.
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