Before the mid-1990s, it was not so easy for a young person to find pornography in the United States. A youth might stumble across an errant Playboy, late-night scrambled pay-per-view ads, or an older sibling's VHS tape, but for anyone under eighteen years of age, porn—and for that matter, an unsanctioned sexual education—were all but inaccessible.

The internet changed all that. By the middle of the 1990s, sexually graphic images abounded on Usenet newsgroups and single-purpose websites, enabling anyone with a dial-up connection and a little bit of privacy to access them. Within just a few years, porn had become so ubiquitous online that the Broadway musical "Avenue Q," which came out in 2003, even dedicated an entire song to it, aptly titled "The Internet Is for Porn." The term "the great equalizer," once reserved to describe education, now rang true for the internet in the hands of porn consumers. As internet lore contends: "if it exists, there's a porn version of it."

Not everyone appreciated this equalizing effect. In July 1995, the cover of Time magazine depicted a small child at a computer screen, eyes wide and mouth open, with the word "CYBERPORN" just under his chin in capital letters. Underneath the word, the headline read: "Exclusive: A new study shows how pervasive and wild it really is. Can we protect our kids—and free speech?"

The feature story was based on a study by Martin Rimm, an undergraduate student at Carnegie Mellon, that had been published in the Georgetown Law Journal. Rimm's paper claimed that 80 percent of images on newsgroups at the time were pornographic in nature—an alarming figure, perhaps, had it been true.

The Time magazine article was disputed by experts and lambasted by the New York Times, but their criticism was of little consequence to lawmakers, who saw a crisis unfolding. In June 1995 (ironically, the same year that two of the most provocative films of the decade, "Show Girls" and "Basic Instinct," premiered), two senators—Democrat Jim Exon of Nebraska and Republican Slade Gorton of Washington—proposed an amendment to the Telecommunications Act that would later become the Communications Decency Act (CDA), extending existing indecency and anti-obscenity laws to the internet. The basis of their proposal? Rimm's study.