Children's Internet Protection Act

The Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) is one of a number of bills that the United States Congress proposed to limit children's exposure to pornography and explicit content online. Background Both of Congress's earlier attempts at restricting indecent Internet content, the Communications Decency Act and the Child Online Protection Act, were held to be unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court on First Amendment grounds. CIPA represented a change in strategy by Congress. While the federal government had no means of directly controlling local school and library boards, many schools and libraries took advantage of Universal Service Fund (USF) discounts derived from universal service fees paid by users in order to purchase eligible telecom services and Internet access. In passing CIPA, Congress required libraries and K-12 schools using these E-Rate discounts on Internet access and internal connections to purchase and use a "technology protection measure" on every computer connected to the Internet. These conditions also applied to a small subset of grants authorized through the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA). CIPA did not provide additional funds for the purchase of the "technology protection measure".