What has changed in the 34 years since the great comedian George Carlin first enumerated the seven words you couldn’t say on television? Almost nothing. Only three of the original words Mr. Carlin listed – tame by contrast to the lexicon of contemporary cursing – have since been uttered on network television, and those only in passing, after 10 p.m. and under the strict supervision of Steven Bochco. The networks fight nickel-and-dime battles with the Federal Communications Commission over fines; any day now, the agency will rule on CBS’s appeal to quash the $550,000 penalty levied by the FCC over the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction at last year’s Super Bowl. But the larger fight hasn’t even been waged. The reason is simple: The networks are more terrified than ever before of their critics and regulators.

The problem has been attributed by the press to what Time magazine called “The Decency Police” in a March 2005 cover story. And it’s true that the networks experience pressure from family values activists like the Parents Television Council, which tracks obscene references and reports them to the government watchdog agency. But for a mammoth broadcasting company like CBS Corporation – with annual revenues approaching $15 billion in 2005 – the fact that it fights the FCC over these charges has become a symptom of the problem. Like the networks, basic cable channels like TNT and TBS – not governed by FCC decency rules – prewash their content, and scrub shows free of anything that smacks of indecent language or behavior. While the culture has shifted toward widespread acceptance of violence and sexuality, television has pedaled backwards, more fearful of indecency crackdowns than ever before. As a result, it has become out of touch with the way young people speak, or think.

In today’s world – with the Internet awash in pornography and popular culture overrun with foul language and imagery – the broadcast networks have become a dainty, Old World anachronism in which characters no longer say what they mean, or how they mean it. David Mamet, once the undisputed king of the four-letter word, has a CBS show – “The Unit” – where foul language has no place. Will Mr. Mamet ever again be bothered to write potty-mouthed masterpieces like “Glengarry Glen Ross” now that he has a real shot at millions in back-end syndication money and DVD revenues? Mick Jagger, whose raunchy song lyrics inspired generations of rockers, stars in a new ABC sitcom for next season; he will now get the satisfaction derived from a six-figure weekly paycheck for a few day’s work a month, so long as he keeps his indecent impulses to himself.

Only one in four Americans between the ages of 12 and 34 can even name all four broadcast networks. That stunning statistic, from a Bolt Media survey released last week, suggests the long-term dilemma facing the network television business – how to stay relevant to an audience tugged in myriad directions by new technologies and attracted to the raw language of movies, music, and fiction. The lineup of shows for the 2006-07 season, as announced at last week’s television upfronts, promises no free-speech breakthroughs; these days, the only boundary-stretching on the networks comes in the depiction of grisly murders on cop shows like “C.S.I.” and “Without a Trace.” Will actor James Woods, who has cursed his way through dozens of feature films, let loose a string of obscenities in his new fall drama, “Shark,” on CBS? Not a chance.

Even HBO – the channel credited by free-speech mavens as the only haven for foul language and dark imagery not allowed elsewhere – delivers fundamentally “safe” programming that can be easily cleaned up for consumption elsewhere. (Basic cablers have bragged in recent years that their syndicated versions of “Sex and the City” and, soon,”The Sopranos” don’t require that much editing.) That’s not a knock against HBO, but the truth is that only FX – with its riveting and raunchy police drama, “The Shield”- has dared to broadcast a show so unrelentingly gritty and realistic that it’s impossible to imagine a sanitized version ever airing on another channel. Even Comedy Central has been forced to turn the bleeps on “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” and “South Park” into part of the joke. What would happen if we could actually hear Cartman curse? Would the world come to a complete stop on its axis? We’ll never know.

Then again, maybe the networks wouldn’t get enough creative benefit from coarse language or other “indecent” elements to make an FCC battle worth the time or money. In the first episode of “Lucky Louie,” the new HBO half-hour laugh-track comedy set to debut next month, characters use foul language and sexual imagery with reckless abandon; the studio audience howls with excess laughter at the shock value, not noticing that the stale jokes come straight from the “I Love Lucy” playbook. The conventional television format remains the same – sex is something to giggle about.

In a perfect world, there’s no reason for television to adhere to a “higher” moral standard than its competition. It makes no sense for its content to be tightly regulated, while Internet video creators can broadcast raunchy programming available to anyone with a high-speed broadband connection – and that includes unsupervised kids, who can register on YouTube.com and see video even HBO wouldn’t touch. But we’re locked into an antiquated double standard in which the government fears the power of television to corrupt our sanitized minds. It’s that mind-set that will drive kids away from television forever, and into the hands of the porn kings that rule the dark corners of the Internet. Is that what the FCC really wants? It’s time the government at last let the television networks join the 21st century, and give them the same freedoms afforded all other forms of speech. Let the Constitution do its job, and parents do theirs.