
Section 230 created the internet as we know it. Don’t mess with it - ilamont
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-kosseff-section-230-internet-20190329-story.html
======
Mirioron
And there it is. The internet turns into cable TV. It'll be yet another
technology under the control of states and large corporations. This means that
it loses most of its value. Sad times.

Thinking of the future is just depressing.

~~~
pdkl95
Most of that change into cable TV - where a few large corporations control the
means of publication - already happened. Section 230 may have helped that
centralization, making it possible to create and extract rent from new forms
of infrastructure without having to worry about moderating how that
infrastructure is used. As usual, large corporations profit by externalizing
costs onto the public.

However, the primary reason publishing now requires an _imprimatur_ [1],
usually from a large increasingly cable-TV-like corporation, is NAT. The
internet where any peer could publish no longer exists. NAT turned it into as
collection of _party lines_. Since real network software isn't possible[2]
over party lines, software development has been limited to centralized client-
server designs.

As for Section 230, an improvement that would help steer the internet away
from cable TV is to remove the power to _control access_ without _liability_
is simple: s/provider/common carrier/. If you don't want liability, you nee to
be a neutral carrier that only moves data as a back box. Inspection and
curation brings liability for the content of what you publish.

[1] [https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-
imprimatur/](https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/)

[2] It is _sometimes_ possible, but nobody tries because NAT traversal[3] is
_hard_.

[3] [http://bford.info/pub/net/p2pnat/](http://bford.info/pub/net/p2pnat/)

~~~
dragonwriter
> Section 230 may have helped that centralization, making it possible to
> create and extract rent from new forms of infrastructure without having to
> worry about moderating how that infrastructure is used.

Section 230 actually was adopted because without it hosts minimized liability
by _not_ moderating; moderation is what opened them up to liability as a
publisher rather than being treated as a distributor, 230 gave a fairly
ironclad (originally) guarantee that they would not be liable if they
moderated content so long as they weren't actively leveraging the illegal
content.

------
_0ffh
Wow, first the EU debacle, now they're coming for the US. It's really getting
hard to not assume that there is a global push to replace the participative
internet with a purely consumptive one under the control of the benevolent
oligarchy.

~~~
cousin_it
Isn't that backwards? To me it seems like this change will mostly hurt walled
gardens, but won't hurt the participative internet (personal websites).

~~~
Brotkrumen
Participative internet includes more than just personal websites. Small
forums, comment sections anywhere, fanfic, fanart, satire, etc., all will have
to shut down if they have no way of avoiding legal liability for user
generated content. Doesn't even matter if it's fair use, as the legal process
is ruinous.

The big walled gardens will have bulk licenses, the small fry and start ups
will die because they can't afford those licenses.

~~~
cousin_it
Small forums and comment sections can moderate themselves, no?

~~~
Brotkrumen
Sure. "Small" being of course up until, say, 100 posts a day? So you just need
to hire a guy that is current on all legislation and court cases related to
copyright in all states so he can determine fair use.

That's probably not a problem since you'd provide him with a comprehensive
database containing all copyrighted material ( audio, text, visual, computer
code) and an algorithm that detects legal equivalents of these materials in
your forum in real time.

------
RandomInteger4
The financial overhead to start any sort of platform for communication on the
internet would be immense. The internet would turn into nothing but static
sites and tightly thought policed elite clubs. Every manner of moderation
currently performed would be overdone 10-fold to protect the platform
administrators from legal liability.

The closest analogy would be digital speakeasies; not for inebriating
beverages, but rather just the ability to communicate.

EDIT: Not sure why I'm being downvoted. This will kill any innovation by small
businesses on the internet. Nobody will take the risks. New platforms akin to
Snapchat or whatever will be looked at as riskier endeavors before they're
even able to get off the ground.

------
neonate
[http://archive.is/JPeZv](http://archive.is/JPeZv)

------
quickthrower2
(this comment is awaiting moderation)

~~~
anticensor
(you need to wait _until pg wakes up_ )

------
CryptoPunk
People take what they have for granted. There has been so much good provided
by the internet. People do not remember what it was like when media
consumption was one to many, with a handful of broadcasters and newspapers
publishing to an audience of millions of people who passively consumed
whatever was produced by this media elite.

Now with all the fearmongering from the Radical Left about the evils of the
internet and big internet companies, and the apathy of voters as their elected
representatives move to centralize control, we're in the process of repealing
the legal protections that made the modern internet, with all of its chaos,
innovation and empowerment, possible.

------
qball
I'm skeptical about the conclusions this article draws. If you eliminate
Section 230, the implication is that major sites _don 't get to moderate their
content if they don't want to be responsible for it_, but that certainly
doesn't imply the end of the Internet much less it as we know it today.

Section 230's main feature is to let sites dodge the responsibility that comes
with the right to act as the modern public square in the US (and most other
countries), where "public square" means that any conversation can be had there
between members of the public provided that conversation isn't outright
illegal (or so loud that no other conversation can take place).

Instead, Section 230 allows website operators to follow whatever moral code
they see fit in terms of moderation. This gives disproportionate political
power to particular American subcultures, and these people trend toward the
Progressive end, injecting the public discourse with a Progressive bias rather
than reflecting the country as a whole because they consider it their moral
duty to stamp out content that is hateful, objectionable, or simply
contradictory/insulting a Progressive cause (whether these judgments are
correct or not is an entirely different matter).

They're clearly doing the best they can under their constraints and
circumstances, and their value judgments are popular worldwide.

Were Section 230 to be eliminated the problems that Sen. Wyden mentions only
get worse, because you either allow everything permissible under 1A or go out
of business due to liability issues (remember, the First Amendment and Supreme
Court precedent do not allow other restrictions) without any popular moral
code to clean it up. Advertisers won't realistically be able to pull funding
because it affects the vast majority of the Internet equally (outside of
dumping millions of dollars into small walled-garden services), and Articles
11 and 13 (not to mention the absolute lack of law even resembling the First
Amendment) in the EU have done an excellent job ensuring that US tech
companies would still face even greater difficulties in Europe.

There's an asterisk for SESTA-FOSTA here (where even unmoderated public
squares might still face legal liability), but that law has yet to be
seriously evaluated against the First Amendment, a challenge it will certainly
fail (a reminder that Section 230 is the _only surviving part of the
Communications Decency Act_ because the rest contravened the 1A).

~~~
dragonwriter
> Were Section 230 to be eliminated the problems that Sen. Wyden mentions only
> get worse, because you either allow everything permissible under 1A or go
> out of business due to liability issues

It definitely means the end of the internet as we know it today; particularly,
because of the collision of various lines of liability precedent (which
motivated 230) it probably means the end of any American commercial entity
hosting content from third parties free of charge, because even unmoderated
unreviewed content will carry far higher risk of liability than today and
moderated venues that don't feature deep and comprehensive review—and payment
to cover the cost (and probably also indemnity clauses)—won't be viable at
all: so instead of moderated public fora or unmoderated public fora you will
have no public forum at all.

~~~
sadris
> because even unmoderated unreviewed content will carry far higher risk of
> liability than today

If it as OP says, the opposite would be true. Either moderate and risk
liability. Or allow anything and get indemnity.

~~~
dragonwriter
> If it as OP says, the opposite would be true.

OP is wrong because there is also significant _distributor_ liability (which
applies even without he kind of active review that creates publisher
liability), notably—at least, this is the specific subject matter that got the
issue with regard to 230 to the Supreme Court—for defamatory content, and
while 230 _expressly_ only protects against publisher liability, the Supreme
Court has found that, where it otherwise applies, it is also a bar for
distributor liability for content.

Even if this _only_ applied to defamatory content, the risk of defamation
lawsuits would eliminate unmoderated public fora without 230.

------
DanBC
Important to point out that the reason S230 is being modified is because
children who were kidnapped and drugged and raped were being advertised for
rape in Backpage, and Backpage:-

1) refused to do anything at all to to remove the images of these children
being raped

2) refused to do anything to prevent the ads being placed

3) gave advice to the advertisers about how to continue placing the ads while
evading law enforcement

4) claimed to be coopoerating with law enforcement while actively making it
harder for law enforcement to trace the people placing these ads

