On Tuesday, a federal appeals court ruled that the FCC’s indecency rules are unconstitutional (a violation of first amendment rights) and vague. Among the reasons cited by the court: the internet –

“We face a media landscape that would have been almost unrecognizable in 1978. Cable television was still in its infancy. The Internet was a project run out of the Department of Defense with several hundred users. Not only did YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter not exist, but their founders were either still in diapers or not yet conceived.”

Part of the reason for the original ruling was that broadcast television was pervasive in our lives and there was no ability to block it. But now broadcast TV exists in a media landscape that also contains cable and the internet as well as parental controls.