Look carefully at each of the Web sites on the list. Please make a notation of any site that appears to meet any of the following criteria:
a. Contains information similar to that already found in libraries,
or
b. Contains information a librarian would want in the library if s/he had unlimited funds to purchase information and unlimited shelf space,
or
c. You would be willing to refer a patron (of any age) to the site if the patron appeared at a reference desk seeking information about the subject of the site. For this last criterion, we recognize that you might not refer a young child to a Calculus site just because it would not be useful to that child, but you should ignore that factor. Informational sites, such as a Calculus site, should be noted. A site that is purely erotica should not be noted.
Sites that received "Yes" votes from both reviewers were determined to be of sufficient interest in a library context and removed from further analysis. Sites receiving one or two "No" votes would go to the next round. In the first round, 243 sites received "Yes" votes from both reviewers, while 456 sites received one or more "No" votes or could not be found. These 456 sites were sent forward to the second round of judging. The instructions for the second-round reviewers were the same as those given to the first-round reviewers, except that in section c, the following sentence was added: "Sites that have a commercial purpose should be included here if they might be of use or interest to someone wishing to buy the product or service or doing research on commercial behavior on the Internet, much as most libraries include the Yellow Pages in their collections." The second round of review produced the following results: 60 sites could not be found (due to broken links, 404 "not found" errors, domain for sale messages, etc.), 231 sites were judged "Yes," and 165 judged "No." Although it was not proffered as evidence in this trial, (and hence we do not rely on it to inform our findings), we note that Youth, Pornography, and the Internet, a congressionally commissioned study by the National Research Council, a division of the National Academies of Science, see Pub. L. 105-314, Title X, Sec. 901, comes to a conclusion similar to the one that we reach regarding the effectiveness of Internet filters. The commission concludes that:
All filtersthose of today and for the foreseeable futuresuffer (and will suffer) from some degree of overblocking (blocking content that should be allowed through) and some degree of underblocking (passing content that should not be allowed through). While the extent of overblocking and underblocking will vary with the product (and may improve over time), underblocking and overblocking result from numerous sources, including the variability in the perspectives that humans bring to the task of judging content.
Youth, Pornography, and the Internet (Dick Thornburgh & Herbert S. Lin, eds., 2002), available at http://bob.nap.edu/html/youth_internet/.
Because we find that the plaintiff public libraries are funded and controlled by state and local governments, they are state actors, subject to the constraints of the First Amendment, as incorporated by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court has recognized that the First Amendment encompasses not only the right to speak, but also the right to receive information. See Reno v. ACLU, 521 U.S. 844, 874 (1997) (invalidating a statute because it "effectively suppresses a large amount of speech that adults have a constitutional right to receive and to address to one another"); Stanley v. Georgia, 394 U.S. 557, 564 (1969) ("[The] right to receive information and ideas, regardless of their social worth . . . is fundamental to our free society."); see also Bd. of Educ. v. Pico, 457 U.S. 853, 867-68 (1982) (plurality opinion) ("[T]he right to receive ideas follows ineluctably from the sender's First Amendment right to send them."). Indeed, if the First Amendment subjected to strict scrutiny the government's decision to dedicate a forum to speech whose content the government judges to be particularly valuable, many of our public institutions of culture would cease to exist in their current form: