Jurassic Regulation
LIKE A PREHISTORIC mosquito trapped in amber, the indecency rules enforced by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are an artifact from a distant past loaded with DNA the regulators periodically try to use to engineer new censorship monsters.
Most people have at least some passing familiarity with these rules, which were codified in Section 1464 of the U.S. Criminal Code but immortalized by George Carlin’s “Filthy Words” monologue. The law has been on the books in various forms since Congress took an early crack at regulating the new medium of radio in 1927, but the corresponding FCC regulations didn’t really begin to take shape until the 1970s. That was when Carlin’s satirical commentary on the rules—and the Supreme Court’s 1978 affirmation of an FCC sanction based on it—set the policy in stone, making it the only legal standard ever created by a stand-up
