Internet puts all countries in First Amendment's reach. (Cybersense).

BACK when I first learned there was something called a Constitution, the United States was the only country in the world with a First Amendment.

But thanks to the Internet, everyone's got one now - like it or not.

The technology that makes it possible for people around the world to exchange their thoughts, their dreams and their naked photos also poses problems for countries that prefer to exercise a bit more discretion. Although free speech is one of our core values in the United States, not every democratically elected government has signed on for the Ku Klux Klan marches, lap dances and abortion clinic protests that come hand and hand with making free expression an ultimatum.

Most democratic countries have resisted the national filtering schemes favored by China and other repressive regimes. But a recent court case involving French law proves that less aggressive efforts are doomed to fail, particularly if they rely on cutting off unseemly expression at its most likely source - the United States.

The case began in April 2000, when two French groups that combat anti-Semitism sued Yahoo for allowing people to sell Nazi-related items in online auctions.

The lawsuit argued that since Yahoo's site was available in France, it violated a French law forbidding the sale of Nazi artifacts or propaganda. A French judge agreed in May 2000, ordering Yahoo to block French residents from accessing the auctions or portions of its directory that link to sites denying the Holocaust. Yahoo argued this was impossible, but the court reaffirmed its order in November and imposed a fine of $13,300 for every day the company didn't comply.

Yahoo subsequently posted a warning on its French affiliate's site and banned hate group paraphernalia from its auctions. But it continued to allow the sale of "Mein Kampf" and other material that violates French law, contending it couldn't be penalized for doing so under the law of its own home country - that is, the First Amendment.

To prove that point, Yahoo filed a lawsuit asking a judge to declare the French court's order unenforceable in the United States. U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel did just that Nov. 7, ruling that United States law supercedes judgments made elsewhere in cases involving shared access to U.S.-based speech.

In so doing, Fogel wrote, the court "necessarily adopts certain value judgments embedded in those enactments, including the fundamental judgment expressed in the First Amendment that it is preferable to permit the nonviolent expression of offensive viewpoints rather than to impose viewpoint-based governmental regulation upon speech." Although the people of France have expressed different sentiments in their own laws, Fogel wrote, they can't enforce them in the United States.

Civil libertarians hailed the ruling, pointing out that online expression would be snuffed out completely if every country in the world could impose their values on the Net.

The ruling won't go over quite so well in France or other countries left unable to extend their laws into cyberspace.

Free speech is an inevitable fact of life on the Internet because it's a hard-wired component of the country that invented it. Countries can try blocking their own citizens' access, but that'll work about as well as efforts to block U.S. residents from accessing foreign-based online casinos.

Content restrictions on the Internet inevitably work their way down to the lowest common denominator. And when it comes to objectionable speech, countries around the world will find that denominator can usually be found right here in the United States.

To contact syndicated columnist Joe Salkowski, you can e-mail him [e-mail] or write to him do Tribune Media Services, Inc., 435 N. Michigan Ave., Suite 1400, Chicago, IL 60611.