I.Hate Speech on the Internet Generally, hate speech receives constitutional protection and is not prosecuted that is why there are relatively few court cases addressing this issue on the Internet. For this reason, sites containing speech discriminating people because of their race or sexual inclinations are available on the Internet. These include the “Ku Klux Klan,” “Nazis,” “White Socialist Party,” “Skinheads” or “Aryan Nation,” for example, which speech is not directed to any person in particular, thus not punishable. In addition, the nature of this medium makes it difficult to trace the perpetrators of hate crime indeed, Web sites are easily relocated or abandoned when legal problems arise. In RAV v. St Paul , the Supreme Court defined that speech leading to racially motivated violence could be punished. Hence, threatening private message involving racial epithet sent over the Internet to someone, as well as a public message on a Web site, are legally actionable.II.The InternetAt the dawn of the new century, the rise of new media such as the Internet, seem to create new issue about the limitations of free speech. However the chore of some free speech cases remains the same as in the past 100 years. The Internet is an outgrowth of a military program called “ARPANET,” which began in 1969. The ARPANET no longer exists, and today the Internet is an international network of interconnected computers. The Internet is “a unique and wholly new medium of worldwide human communication.” People can access the Internet from many different sources, several major national “online services” such as America Online, or CompuServe provide access to their own networks as well as broader links to the Internet. The Internet offers a wide variety of communication and information methods, such as “e-mail,” automatic mailing list service...
