222
Stevens, J., dissenting
Given the quantity and ever-changing character of Web sites offering free sexually explicit material,1 it is inevitable that a substantial amount of such material will never be blocked. Because of this "underblocking," the statute will provide parents with a false sense of security without really solving the problem that motivated its enactment. Conversely, the software's reliance on words to identify undesirable sites necessarily results in the blocking of thousands of pages that "contain content that is completely innocuous for both adults and minors, and that no rational person could conclude matches the filtering companies' category definitions, such as 'pornography' or 'sex.' " Id., at 449. In my judgment, a statutory blunderbuss that mandates this vast amount of "overblocking" abridges the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment.
The effect of the overblocking is the functional equivalent of a host of individual decisions excluding hundreds of thousands of individual constitutionally protected messages from Internet terminals located in public libraries throughout the Nation. Neither the interest in suppressing unlawful speech nor the interest in protecting children from access to harmful materials justifies this overly broad restriction on adult access to protected speech. "The Government may not suppress lawful speech as the means to suppress unlawful speech." Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, 535 U. S. 234, 255 (2002).2
1 "The percentage of Web pages on the indexed Web containing sexually explicit content is relatively small. Recent estimates indicate that no more than 1-2% of the content on the Web is pornographic or sexually explicit. However, the absolute number of Web sites offering free sexually explicit material is extremely large, approximately 100,000 sites." 201 F. Supp. 2d 401, 419 (ED Pa. 2002).
2 We have repeatedly reaffirmed the holding in Butler v. Michigan, 352 U. S. 380, 383 (1957), that the State may not "reduce the adult population . . . to reading only what is fit for children." See Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, 535 U. S., at 252; United States v. Playboy Entertainment Group, Inc., 529 U. S. 803, 814 (2000) ("[T]he objective of shielding chil-
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