03/02/2020 UNITED STATES V. AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSN., INC. manner of student publications except those based on religion. We held that the fund had created a limited public forum by giving public money to student groups who wished to publish, and therefore could not discriminate on the basis of viewpoint. The situation here is very different. A public library does not acquire Internet terminals in order to create a public forum for Web publishers to express themselves, any more than it collects books in order to provide a public forum for the authors of books to speak. It provides Internet access, not to “encourage a diversity of views from private speakers,” Rosenberger, supra, at 834, but for the same reasons it offers other library resources: to facilitate research, learning, and recreational pursuits by furnishing materials of requisite and appropriate quality. See Cornelius, supra, at 805 (noting, in upholding limits on participation in the Combined Federal Campaign (CFC), that “[t]he Government did not create the CFC for purposes of providing a forum for expressive activity”). As Congress recognized, “[t]he Internet is simply another method for making information available in a school or library.” S. Rep. No. 106—141, p. 7 (1999). It is “no more than a technological extension of the book stack.” Ibid.3 The District Court disagreed because, whereas a library reviews and affirmatively chooses to acquire every book in its collection, it does not review every Web site that it makes available. 201 F. Supp. 2d, at 462—463. Based on this distinction, the court reasoned that a public library enjoys less discretion in deciding which Internet materials to make available than in making book selections. Ibid. We do not find this distinction constitutionally relevant. A library’s failure to make quality-based judgments about all the material it furnishes from the Web does not somehow taint the judgments it does make. A library’s need to exercise judgment in making collection decisions depends on its traditional role in identifying suitable and worthwhile material; it is no less entitled to play that role when it collects material from the Internet than when it collects material from any other source. Most libraries already exclude pornography from their print collections because they deem it inappropriate for inclusion. We do not subject these decisions to heightened scrutiny; it would make little sense to treat libraries’ judgments to block online pornography any differently, when these judgments are made for just the same reason. Moreover, because of the vast quantity of material on the Internet and the rapid pace at which it changes, libraries cannot possibly segregate, item by item, all the Internet material that is appropriate for inclusion from all that is not. While a library could limit its Internet collection to just those sites it found worthwhile, it could do so only at the cost of excluding an enormous amount of valuable information that it lacks the capacity to review. Given that tradeoff, it is entirely reasonable for public libraries to reject that approach and instead exclude certain categories of content, without making individualized judgments that everything they do make available has requisite and appropriate quality. Like the District Court, the dissents fault the tendency of filtering software to “overblock”–that is, to erroneously block access to constitutionally protected speech that falls outside the categories that software users intend to block. See post, at 1—3 (opinion of Stevens, J.); post, at 3—4 (opinion of Souter, J.). Due to the software’s https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/02-361.ZO.html 6/13