Last week's announcement by sixty-six ABC affiliates that they would not run the unedited version of Saving Private Ryan was proof positive that the FCC's goal of stifling any speech that could be construed as offensive has been met.

And what is the concern over Saving Private Ryan, a critically-acclaimed film about World war II? Indecency and violence. And yet, last year, before the world got a brief glimpse of Janet Jackson's boob, eyes and ears were not offended by the gruesomeness of war, or if they were, they didn't say anything about it. What is even more outrageous is that the FCC refuses to state before a broadcast whether or not that broadcast could be construed as "indecent." A Washington Post article about the incident says that "Citadel [an owner of some of the affiliate stations] attempted to get an advance waiver from the FCC but the commission refused, saying that stations need to 'exercise their own good-faith judgment.'" What kind of organization is this? "We won't tell you if your content is indecent or not, but if it turns out to be indecent, we'll fine you." In First Amendment law, this is called a "chilling effect." Even though speech may be protected by the First Amendment, the possibility of civil or criminal proceedings -- and the subsequent cost they incur -- is a disincentive to produce that speech. The person making the speech weighs the two options: don't make the speech, or make it and face possible consequences. Invariably, the person chooses the former. The "chilling effect" only refers to the way in which legal speech is censored by over-reaching laws.

How interesting that, all of a sudden, Janet Jackson's boob prompted such moral outrage (in 2002, the FCC rejected 83% of indecency complaints, says Wired News). Or it could be that a few groups which have always disliked the content on television used the boob incident as a catalyst to get their agendas turned into policy (Parents Television Council, a conservative Christian group, launched a letter-writing campaign to get CBS fined for Boobgate. The FCC received 540,000 complaints, and FCC chairman Michael Powell was so impressed with the quantity of complaints that he slapped CBS with a $550,000 fine, beginning the current indecency war.)

Ah, but if you thought that Bono, Janet Jackson, and Howard Stern were the only focus of the FCC, then you're wrong. The FCC is attempting to assert authority over cable and satellite TV, as well as your television and computer. The FCC is looking to extend its control over content into cable televison, despite Supreme Court decisions emphasizing that speech rules for cable are very different from what they are on broadcast television (in fact, there are no decency standards for cable TV; networks voluntarily maintain a particular level of decency so as to keep advertisers). The FCC is also mandating that all devices capable of receiving a digital TV (DTV) signal must be enabled to respect the so-called broadcast flag. What's the big deal? Susan Crawford says:

The thing is, this rule doesn't merely affect TV receiving equipment. It affects everything that RECEIVES digital files from TV receiving equipment as well -- every device inside any home network. It affects the open-platform PC. It's a sweeping rule. And now FCC's jurisdiction to enact this rule is being argued in sweeping terms.

Why should we care about all of this? We should care because if the FCC has the power to act on anything that has something to do with communication, we have only the FCC's self-restraint to rely on when it comes to all internet communications. We should care because we want open platforms and open communications to continue. We should care because the future of the internet is at stake -- the FCC will use its "ancillary jurisdiction" to impose "social policies" on any services that use the internet protocol, and will point to its broadcast flag action as support for its jurisdictional claims.

The problem with a bureaucratic organization like FCC is that it has a broad congressional mandate to fulfill its obligation as the custodian of the electromagnetic spectrum. It can do anything it wants in order to fulfill this goal; essentially, as long as it isn't expressly forbidden, it's allowed.