Did the Internet Shatter Our Notions of Traditional Dyadic Communication?

The traditional First Amendment battlefield is framed in terms of dyadic communication, a speaker conveys a message to a listener, the press transmits a message to a listener, and a publisher distributes a message to a reader.    In the vast majority of situation any government action will be focused on the originator of the message.   At times focusing civil or criminal penalties on the speaker based on the content or content neutral regulation, sometimes based on the location,  sometimes it is even based on conduct which may be construed as speech .  In rare cases the government will focus its regulatory attention on the receiver by punishing possession or receipt of communicative materials deemed to be illegal.   Traditional copyright regulation is also framed in terms of dyadic communication, and until recently the two distinct legal theories seemed to coexist without much friction, until the internet introduced a new multilayered, multimedia form of communication.  By its very nature the internet has changed the traditional dynamic of dyadic communication by embedding several layers of private actors between the speaker and the receiver.   It will be one of this century’s great governmental challenges to regulate speech in the absence of dyadic simplicity.  One of the government’s early attempts at both regulating speech in the absence of traditional dyadic communication and addressing the free-speech/copyright paradox is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA).   Within the DMCA is a safe harbor provision designed to protect Internet Service Providers (ISP) from secondary liability if they comply with the statute