Absolutely. I'm not saying that's the best possible solution, but it has the advantage of historical precedent for a similar problem: a few companies have too much influence on public discussion.
And it addresses the flaw in Section 230: companies that act like publishers but claim the protections of platforms.
So is that the best reply you can come up with, or do you have any other reasonable objections besides those I've already addressed?
Your proposal is for Congress to essentially blackmail server owners, note: not just corporations, but server owners with anything that can be called an “interactive computer service” such as a comments section, with an extant statutory liability shield, because the news media, note: not social media, not search engines, we were actually discussing the news media, are not viewpoint neutral. There is no such thing as viewpoint neutrality by the way so enjoy your selective enforcement.
Your proposal as to how it could work amounts to while the First Amendment does say “Congress shall make no law etc.”, it doesn’t say anything at all about Congress not weasel around it, engage in political blackmail, and make bad law anyway”, just so you can get away with calling it “not technically compelled speech”.
Your motivation appears to be to increase the number of forums in the broadest sense of the term in which people can talk freely as like if they were on government property instead of private property, at the expense of private property rights, that other thing that is integral to a free society and liberty. The mechanism by which you propose to do so would however provide a strong incentive for existing server owners to get out of the forum business thus actually reducing the total number of servers and services connected to the internet on which you can post.
There isn’t anything I can say to your position that you haven’t said yourself if this is seriously your position. I mean it’s immoral, antithetical to both free speech as a cultural phenomenon as well as our laws, antithetical to private property rights, and probably also unconstitutional, and at the very least a massive abuse of legislative authority. I guess if you can convince Congress to pass your proposal, the New York Times and Fox News should also be quaking in their boots at the prospect of turning off their comments sections (do they even still have comments sections?).
My recommendation instead is to make peace with the idea that there’s a website, podcast, subreddit, Facebook group, IRC, Slack and/or Discord channel for every opinion, every gradation of an opinion, and every type of audience. The web is a big place. Not quite as big as the Universe but from our puny positions with our lack of perspective it might as well be as big.
Almost every regulation on business could be considered "at the expense of private property rights". That doesn't matter to anyone except libertarians.
Likewise, any law could be called "blackmail", because they all threaten negative consequences if someone doesn't do what the government says, but that doesn't matter to anyone at all.
Those aren't serious objections to any regulation.
And it's ironic to call this "antithetical to free speech as a cultural phenomenon" when this would be a defense of free speech for 99% of the population.
The rights of a few billionaires who own web companies shouldn't trump the rights of the public.
Finally, where do you get the idea that companies simply couldn't exist if they didn't remove user content that doesn't violate a few regulations the law would allow (like spam, threats, obscenity, and copyright, which would all be clearly Constitutional content-based exceptions)? That reddit, for example, would have to shut down if they hadn't banned The_Donald or ChapoTrapHouse? That would be a fair objection, if you can support it.
> Finally, where do you get the idea that companies simply couldn't exist if they didn't remove user content that doesn't violate a few regulations the law would allow (like spam, threats, obscenity, and copyright, which would all be clearly Constitutional content-based exceptions)?
So if I want to run a website with comments I need a lawyer to review each comment? Like how am I, a layman, supposed to determine whether a comment violates copyright or is actually fair use? Or whether it's a "true threat" as opposed to bluster ("Next person who comments about X is getting slapped")? What happens if I wrongly remove a comment?
How that's different from any other business? Businesses have to remove disruptive customers, fire employees, etc; there are rules about that; and somehow they manage.
Probably there would be exceptions for personal non-commercial sites and even small businesses. There's plenty of room for compromise between the status quo and draconian rules that shut down every website.
> Almost every regulation on business could be considered "at the expense of private property rights". That doesn't matter to anyone except libertarians.
This is something that matters to anyone that owns or aspires to own property and assets: houses, vehicles, servers and other fixed assets, as well as the money in your bank and brokerage accounts. Our economy doesn’t exist without private property rights.
> Likewise, any law could be called "blackmail", because they all threaten negative consequences if someone doesn't do what the government says, but that doesn't matter to anyone at all.
The reason and intent behind a law matters in a democratic society if you prefer laws to be just rather than tyrannical in nature. Section 230 despite the political football it has become was actually a fairly reasonable piece of law. The courts may have come around to similar law through procedure, but by passing it as a statute from the legislature, it quickly resolved what the risks were to running a server other people could use as long as you made a good faith effort to moderate publicly accessible data which enabled the sort of risk-taking that made an interactive web possible. You would take this otherwise fine piece of legislature and smack private entities upside the head with it, and if you can’t see the problem with it, I can’t help you see it.
> And it's ironic to call this "antithetical to free speech as a cultural phenomenon" when this would be a defense of free speech for 99% of the population.
99% is actually a reduction. What part of “Congress shall make no law etc.” is unclear? Generally when two parties have conflicting free speech interests, the property owner wins. That means the owner of the server prevails. You, as a private individual, can purchase your own server, and if you let me post to it, you can kick me off of it and I would have zero remedy.
> The rights of a few billionaires who own web companies shouldn't trump the rights of the public.
As I’ve just outlined, this is not zero sum. There are countless channels in which you can exercise your first amendment rights, but you are not entitled to do so on someone else’s property more than they allow.
> Finally, where do you get the idea that companies simply couldn't exist
Absolutely. I'm not saying that's the best possible solution, but it has the advantage of historical precedent for a similar problem: a few companies have too much influence on public discussion.
And it addresses the flaw in Section 230: companies that act like publishers but claim the protections of platforms.
So is that the best reply you can come up with, or do you have any other reasonable objections besides those I've already addressed?