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Though I'm Web editor here at the ÀÏ°ÄÃÅ¿ª½±½á¹û now, I was once an editor in the Kids and Teens area of ÀÏ°ÄÃÅ¿ª½±½á¹û.com -- and the COPA trial reminds me of the craziness we faced at ÀÏ°ÄÃÅ¿ª½±½á¹û when (Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998), note the extra P, was first passed by Congress.

COPA with one P (Child Online Protection Act) is the latest in a long, long line of attempts to regulate and restrain the uniquely universalist space of the Internet. If you read , you can get a sense of the surreal quality of the proceedings relative to the subject and of the history that Nerve.com has with COPA and Internet censorship.

For the folks at ÀÏ°ÄÃÅ¿ª½±½á¹û, COPPA meant that if we didn't retool the entire site, basically, we were looking at $30,000 dollars a day in fines and the CEO, someone who at the time I thought was a good guy, would be carted off to jail. All our good, healthy access to kids and all our useful, vital information about thousands of topics was put in jeopardy by a hysterical, ill-informed response to the infinite possibilities of the Internet.

Working at the ÀÏ°ÄÃÅ¿ª½±½á¹û I know now that there is even more confusion in the world of Internet censorship-related acronyms: There's COPA, COPPA, , and , to name just a few.

Happily, the news from Philadelphia, the testimony and the commentary -- like -- show that we're still keeping it straight, that we are still focused on the basic point: online speech must be free speech.