8 ms·

Internet Association Endorses Internet Censorship Bill

209 points by DiabloD3 9y ago

IBM 9y ago
>Amazon and eBay would be able to absorb the increased legal risk under SESTA. They would likely be able to afford the high-powered lawyers to survive the wave in lawsuits against them. Small startups, including would-be competitors, would not. It shouldn’t pass our attention that the Internet giants are now endorsing a bill that will make it much more difficult for newcomers ever to compete with them. All banks have to comply with Know Your Customer regulations, which is easier for bigger banks than smaller ones. And yet society has deemed that combating money laundering and tax evasion is worth the cost. It'll be fine. Just raise more capital from your investors, it's essentially free these days. The more interesting story with this law is more of a meta story. Here we have a change to a bedrock law that for over 20 years has granted the tech industry immunity from any liability for anything on their platforms. Which is just kind of amazing if you think about it. Imagine if the energy industry didn't have to deal with EPA regulations or manufacturing companies didn't have to deal with OSHA regulations. The political winds are starting to shift and the tech industry is increasingly going to be held responsible for the negative externalities they create.
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
  God, this mindset is disgusting. What if I don't want to make the kinds of toxic growth-addict business that venture capital leads to? As for banks, why don't you take a hard look at what banking monoculture has given society?
  - IBM 9y ago
    Then don't? VCs aren't the only source of capital. I also have no idea how you could say the US has a "banking monoculture". There are almost 5000 banks in the US.
    - StudentStuff 9y ago
      Nearly all of those smaller banks are merely resellers, adding nothing besides a point of presence to the value of what they sell.
- ozaark 9y ago
  All to make the powerful(AKA monopolistic oligarchy of corporations) even more satiated with control.
  - IBM 9y ago
    This law is very clearly designed to tackle a negative externality from tech companies. It could have been more expansive, but it's limited to just sex trafficking. Governments have antitrust laws to handle monopolies. If you're concerned with concentration (as I am), you should support more aggressive antitrust enforcement (and political candidates that do).
    - syshum 9y ago
      >This law is very clearly designed to tackle a negative externality from tech companies What externatlity is that? If they want to fight sex trafficking, really fight sex trafficking, they need to start by making prostitution and other forms of sex work legal. Prohibition is what drives the activity under ground and creates the market for Sex Trafficking in the first place. It forces people that want to consume those services to a market that is outside the law, as such bad things happen, this is same for Drug Prohibition. All you have to look to his the passage of the 18th amendment, all of the problems and violence prohibition of alcohol brought, and then the passage of the 21 amendment to end it. Today I do not see Budweiser shooting up Coors over territory, do you?
- ve55 9y ago
  >society has deemed that combating money laundering and tax evasion is worth the cost. I'm not sure that's the case, there's definitely many who would disagree, and even some banks. Complying with these regulations is very expensive and there's not a ton of evidence for how effective they are. Obviously they help sometimes, but the signal to noise ratio is likely very poor and they're not very cost-effective for the amount of overhead involved. In addition to banks, money services businesses must comply with these regulations - people have gone to jail just for selling bitcoin for cash because they didn't do KYC/AML. Of course, no one related to banks goes to jail no matter how bad their compliance is. Relating this to the original article a bit more, it's likely that these things will be abused very badly, with small players going to prison and big players only paying minor fines at worst.
- mcguire 9y ago
  "Imagine if the energy industry didn't have to deal with EPA regulations or manufacturing companies didn't have to deal with OSHA regulations. The political winds are starting to shift and the tech industry is increasingly going to be held responsible for the negative externalities they create." Imagine if the telephone industry had to monitor phone usage to block criminal use. Imagine if the postal service was charged with filtering any potentially illegal activities. "Section 230 doesn’t cause lawlessness. Rather, it creates a space in which many things — including lawless behavior — come to light. And it’s in that light that multitudes of organizations and people have taken proactive steps to usher victims to safety and apprehend their abusers." -- Alexandra F. Levy, Adjunct Professor of Human Trafficking & Human Markets, Notre Dame Law School
  - Finnucane 9y ago
    >magine if the postal service was charged with filtering any potentially illegal activities. The Postal Inspection Service _is_ tasked with filtering stuff that is prohibited from the mail, such as child porn, illegal drugs, and nuclear weapons. While the USPS isn't responsible for illegal stuff that happens through the mail, they do have a whole law-enforcement branch to deal with it.
- syshum 9y ago
  >>Which is just kind of amazing if you think about it. Imagine if the energy industry didn't have to deal with EPA regulations or manufacturing companies didn't have to deal with OSHA regulations. The political winds are starting to shift and the tech industry is increasingly going to be held responsible for the negative externalities they create. wow, what a terrible analogy. First off you have seemed to conflate 3rd party liability and 1st party liability. If a Company pollutes say a river that is the Company doing it directly. Thus they are liable for it If someone posts some threating comment, or some copyrighted work to a website the hosting company did not do anything wrong, they provided a service that was then used illegally, holding them liable for that would be holding a 3rd party liable. Something that should be rejected by society A better anology would be "Image if Ford was responsible for every drunk driver that used a Ford Car irresponsibly and killed someone with it" Do you blame Home Depot for renting a truck to a Terrorist? Dont answer that I bet you do. >All banks have to comply with Know Your Customer regulations, which is easier for bigger banks than smaller ones. And yet society has deemed that combating money laundering and tax evasion is worth the cost. Some of use in society do not agree it is worth the cost >>It'll be fine. Yes because the banking industry is a shining example of ethics, customer service. Next to lawyers I can not think of a more hated group in society than Bankers. There is a reason for this and the fact that competition is limited due to the law you cited and many others is a reason for this.
- bobcostas55 9y ago
  I'm glad you brought up the banking industry because it's a perfect example of how such high fixed costs favor large incumbents, stifle competition, and prevent new entrants. In the US since 2010, 10 (ten) new banks have started up. Meanwhile the stock prices of large established banks have soared. Imagine a world with ten new internet startups in 7 years; this is a step in that direction. This is not a fantasy but something that the government actually did to another industry.
lowglow 9y ago
Things like this that worry me and make me diametrically opposed to any of the big company employees holding seats of authority at any body residing over any spec or working groups as well. They'll never have the user's interest at heart.
- ozaark 9y ago
  It's regulatory capture we're living with.
- ilaksh 9y ago
  The big companies have almost gained complete control of the US: from Amazon for online retail, Walmart offline, Facebook social et al social, Google information retrieval, monopoly ISPs, Uber, etc. So I keep reiterating the solution I see which is to replace these monopolies with public distributed peer to peer evolving technologies. And no one seems to support me when I suggest this is possible or desirable.
  - zdkl 9y ago
    I'm entirely of your opinion, but what you describe doesnnt sound like the US way of handling things. There are some initiatives in that direction from INRIA and other european groups but aside from GNU and the EFF no one is even talking about things like Taler in the states. Vote with your wallets and browsing habits!
SturgeonsLaw 9y ago
As soon as I see a "protect the x" bill with bipartisan support, my knee jerk reaction is to mistrust it
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- nasredin 9y ago
  One party controls all the branches of US government. The fact that they have trouble passing these "protect the children" type laws QUICKLY leaves me in awe of the resilience of the American political system.
  - ShabbosGoy 9y ago
    One party that is arguably one of the most divided political parties in modern US history.
    - mtgx 9y ago
      Both parties are, because people are starting to notice the limits of a two-party system. Heck, half of Americans don't even identify with either of the two parties anymore, so it's already pretty crazy that we've gotten this far without having more than 2 major parties. There are a lot of hurdles in going beyond 2 parties - hurdles set-up by the 2 main parties - but I think people will increasingly put pressure on this system until it will break. This could happen for instance through a third-party presidential candidate that takes at least second place in a general election, while one of the two main parties is relegated to third place. I think we're getting pretty close to that happening, but I don't know if it's going to happen in 2020, 2024, or 2028. But probably no later than that. There are millions of Americans who have extreme distrust in the two main parties, so "all it takes" (easier said than done) is for them to actually organize behind one candidate in an election and refusing to buy the "lesser evil" excuse that the two main parties have used for decades to keep people from fleeing to other parties.
arbie 9y ago
Is it concerning that this could be wielded as an anti-piracy measure? It is easier to take down entire file-sharing domains rather than DMCA one offending link at a time.
pasbesoin 9y ago
Monopoly (oligopoly) 101: 1) Climb. 2) Pull the ladder up behind you. I think trafficking is horrible. I also think that censorship aids abuse, including probably trafficking. Would we even be having this conversation, if decentralized conversation hadn't brought such topics into broader, public knowledge? Would Weinstein still be preying, if an open Web hadn't made an end-run around mainstream media and their "pulled" stories? Maybe apples and oranges. On the other hand, law enforcement has earned zero credibility towards their claims of apples actually being apples. In other words, where are the stories -- the facts -- demonstrating such ubiquitous surveillance and censorship actually achieving their stated goals? As well as not serving other unstated, clandestine goals and mission creep. Remember when "Internet surveillance" was strictly for and "because terrorists"? How long did that last?
- comex 9y ago
  > Would Weinstein still be preying, if an open Web hadn't made an end-run around mainstream media and their "pulled" stories? The Harvey Weinstein story initially broke via articles published in the New York Times and New Yorker, which are pretty much as mainstream as it gets, so… probably not? Is there something I’m missing?
  - tgragnato 9y ago
    Traditional "mainstream" media are not dead, but they struggled to keep up with the challenge imposed by the new media. Readership habits changed: free content, physical vs virtual, advertisement model ... Journalistic freedom and space found (self-censorship) in the mainstream media are directly or indirectly affected by this. How many articles have not been published in the past because of the relationships with advertisers? (Hollywood is a big player in this) Now there's a different barrier for stories to get published. Sometimes it's a better thing, other times it's not.
- userbinator 9y ago
  Remember when "Internet surveillance" was strictly for and "because terrorists"? How long did that last? It still is. Along with children (and child porn in particular), "extremists", drugs, and other things that provoke more emotional than rational thought. These days, almost everything oppressive is done in the name of "security".
yuhong 9y ago
The most interesting stuff is about state criminal law, where each state will be different. Of course, SESTA is more than just that, but it is still an interesting question.
userbinator 9y ago
The Internet Association doesn’t represent the Internet—it represents the few companies that profit the most off of Internet activity. Reminds me of the similarly misleadingly named "Internet.org" - Facebook's walled-garden "substitute" for an actual Internet connection.
- Godel_unicode 9y ago
  You're aware that internet.org provides free access to Wikipedia, yes? How can you possibly object to that?
  - klokoman 9y ago
    Wikipedia is extremely biased and, more important, it is not the internet. If you teach people that internet is cable tv 2.0 very bad things will happen.
    - aisofteng 9y ago
      I'm not aware of this "extreme" bias in Wikipedia. What is it?
      - oj-lappi 9y ago
        There is research comparing wikipedia to encyclopaedia britannica which concludes that wikipedia has more "left code words" per article than EB. However a) this research is very US-centric b) the paper also concludes that code word per word is pretty much equal between the two, wikipedia just has longer articles 1. https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/do-experts-or-collective-intelligence-write-with-more-bias-evidence-from-encyclopdia-britannica-and-wikipedia https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/do-experts-or-collective-intellig...
        King-Aaron 9y ago
        I tend to feel that this research is fundamentally bullshit.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago
The Internet companies lost the high ground in regard to censorship and 3rd party speech when they tried to shutdown Daily Stormer. When Google or CloudFlare were told that the website was using their services, instead of taking the high ground with regard to the principle of free speech and 3rd party speech on their services, they used their right to free association to withdraw service. Now when you use free association to withdraw internet service that you oppose, you implicitly are saying that you endorse the services you keep. Now most people agree that if people who advocate Nazism are bad, people who actually engage in human trafficking are even worse. And if you are ok with making sure that the former are not on the Internet, you should be even more ok with keeping the latter off the Internet. This is the reason why the ACLU has historically been pretty absolutist about free speech, even defending and making sure that the government does not censorship even the most odious of speech. In the past, section 230 made sense as most of the companies had a lassez-faire attitude to speech on their services. With companies now doing more to me censor 3rd party speech on their platform, section 230 is seen as the tech companies wanting to have your cake (bot have any liability for 3rd party speech) and eat it too(be able to censor 3rd party speech whenever they want).
- IBM 9y ago
  >The Internet companies lost the high ground in regard to censorship and 3rd party speech when they tried to shutdown Daily Stormer. When Google or CloudFlare were told that the website was using their services, instead of taking the high ground with regard to the principle of free speech and 3rd party speech on their services, they used their right to free association to withdraw service. This lassez-faire attitude you speak of never existed. They lost the high ground the moment they started policing their platforms for spam, adult content, malware, copyrighted content, terrorist propaganda, etc., thereby expressing editorial control. They want to have it both ways, they want to absolve themselves of all responsibility (and liability) for anything that's on their platform and at the same time remove anything that is in-line with their commercial interests (for UX reasons or because their advertisers object to the content their ads run on).
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago
partycoder 9y ago
Corporations maximize shareholder value. Corporations are not your friend and are not patriotic. Don't expect corporations to have your best interest in mind, or appeal to a greater good. They exist to make themselves more profitable on a quarterly or fiscal year basis.

209 points by DiabloD3 9y ago

IBM 9y ago

>Amazon and eBay would be able to absorb the increased legal risk under SESTA. They would likely be able to afford the high-powered lawyers to survive the wave in lawsuits against them. Small startups, including would-be competitors, would not. It shouldn’t pass our attention that the Internet giants are now endorsing a bill that will make it much more difficult for newcomers ever to compete with them. All banks have to comply with Know Your Customer regulations, which is easier for bigger banks than smaller ones. And yet society has deemed that combating money laundering and tax evasion is worth the cost. It'll be fine. Just raise more capital from your investors, it's essentially free these days. The more interesting story with this law is more of a meta story. Here we have a change to a bedrock law that for over 20 years has granted the tech industry immunity from any liability for anything on their platforms. Which is just kind of amazing if you think about it. Imagine if the energy industry didn't have to deal with EPA regulations or manufacturing companies didn't have to deal with OSHA regulations. The political winds are starting to shift and the tech industry is increasingly going to be held responsible for the negative externalities they create.

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
God, this mindset is disgusting. What if I don't want to make the kinds of toxic growth-addict business that venture capital leads to? As for banks, why don't you take a hard look at what banking monoculture has given society?
- IBM 9y ago
  Then don't? VCs aren't the only source of capital. I also have no idea how you could say the US has a "banking monoculture". There are almost 5000 banks in the US.
  - StudentStuff 9y ago
    Nearly all of those smaller banks are merely resellers, adding nothing besides a point of presence to the value of what they sell.
ozaark 9y ago
All to make the powerful(AKA monopolistic oligarchy of corporations) even more satiated with control.
- IBM 9y ago
  This law is very clearly designed to tackle a negative externality from tech companies. It could have been more expansive, but it's limited to just sex trafficking. Governments have antitrust laws to handle monopolies. If you're concerned with concentration (as I am), you should support more aggressive antitrust enforcement (and political candidates that do).
  - syshum 9y ago
    >This law is very clearly designed to tackle a negative externality from tech companies What externatlity is that? If they want to fight sex trafficking, really fight sex trafficking, they need to start by making prostitution and other forms of sex work legal. Prohibition is what drives the activity under ground and creates the market for Sex Trafficking in the first place. It forces people that want to consume those services to a market that is outside the law, as such bad things happen, this is same for Drug Prohibition. All you have to look to his the passage of the 18th amendment, all of the problems and violence prohibition of alcohol brought, and then the passage of the 21 amendment to end it. Today I do not see Budweiser shooting up Coors over territory, do you?
ve55 9y ago
>society has deemed that combating money laundering and tax evasion is worth the cost. I'm not sure that's the case, there's definitely many who would disagree, and even some banks. Complying with these regulations is very expensive and there's not a ton of evidence for how effective they are. Obviously they help sometimes, but the signal to noise ratio is likely very poor and they're not very cost-effective for the amount of overhead involved. In addition to banks, money services businesses must comply with these regulations - people have gone to jail just for selling bitcoin for cash because they didn't do KYC/AML. Of course, no one related to banks goes to jail no matter how bad their compliance is. Relating this to the original article a bit more, it's likely that these things will be abused very badly, with small players going to prison and big players only paying minor fines at worst.
mcguire 9y ago
"Imagine if the energy industry didn't have to deal with EPA regulations or manufacturing companies didn't have to deal with OSHA regulations. The political winds are starting to shift and the tech industry is increasingly going to be held responsible for the negative externalities they create." Imagine if the telephone industry had to monitor phone usage to block criminal use. Imagine if the postal service was charged with filtering any potentially illegal activities. "Section 230 doesn’t cause lawlessness. Rather, it creates a space in which many things — including lawless behavior — come to light. And it’s in that light that multitudes of organizations and people have taken proactive steps to usher victims to safety and apprehend their abusers." -- Alexandra F. Levy, Adjunct Professor of Human Trafficking & Human Markets, Notre Dame Law School
- Finnucane 9y ago
  >magine if the postal service was charged with filtering any potentially illegal activities. The Postal Inspection Service _is_ tasked with filtering stuff that is prohibited from the mail, such as child porn, illegal drugs, and nuclear weapons. While the USPS isn't responsible for illegal stuff that happens through the mail, they do have a whole law-enforcement branch to deal with it.
syshum 9y ago
>>Which is just kind of amazing if you think about it. Imagine if the energy industry didn't have to deal with EPA regulations or manufacturing companies didn't have to deal with OSHA regulations. The political winds are starting to shift and the tech industry is increasingly going to be held responsible for the negative externalities they create. wow, what a terrible analogy. First off you have seemed to conflate 3rd party liability and 1st party liability. If a Company pollutes say a river that is the Company doing it directly. Thus they are liable for it If someone posts some threating comment, or some copyrighted work to a website the hosting company did not do anything wrong, they provided a service that was then used illegally, holding them liable for that would be holding a 3rd party liable. Something that should be rejected by society A better anology would be "Image if Ford was responsible for every drunk driver that used a Ford Car irresponsibly and killed someone with it" Do you blame Home Depot for renting a truck to a Terrorist? Dont answer that I bet you do. >All banks have to comply with Know Your Customer regulations, which is easier for bigger banks than smaller ones. And yet society has deemed that combating money laundering and tax evasion is worth the cost. Some of use in society do not agree it is worth the cost >>It'll be fine. Yes because the banking industry is a shining example of ethics, customer service. Next to lawyers I can not think of a more hated group in society than Bankers. There is a reason for this and the fact that competition is limited due to the law you cited and many others is a reason for this.
bobcostas55 9y ago
I'm glad you brought up the banking industry because it's a perfect example of how such high fixed costs favor large incumbents, stifle competition, and prevent new entrants. In the US since 2010, 10 (ten) new banks have started up. Meanwhile the stock prices of large established banks have soared. Imagine a world with ten new internet startups in 7 years; this is a step in that direction. This is not a fantasy but something that the government actually did to another industry.

lowglow 9y ago

Things like this that worry me and make me diametrically opposed to any of the big company employees holding seats of authority at any body residing over any spec or working groups as well. They'll never have the user's interest at heart.

ozaark 9y ago
It's regulatory capture we're living with.
ilaksh 9y ago
The big companies have almost gained complete control of the US: from Amazon for online retail, Walmart offline, Facebook social et al social, Google information retrieval, monopoly ISPs, Uber, etc. So I keep reiterating the solution I see which is to replace these monopolies with public distributed peer to peer evolving technologies. And no one seems to support me when I suggest this is possible or desirable.
- zdkl 9y ago
  I'm entirely of your opinion, but what you describe doesnnt sound like the US way of handling things. There are some initiatives in that direction from INRIA and other european groups but aside from GNU and the EFF no one is even talking about things like Taler in the states. Vote with your wallets and browsing habits!

SturgeonsLaw 9y ago

As soon as I see a "protect the x" bill with bipartisan support, my knee jerk reaction is to mistrust it

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
nasredin 9y ago
One party controls all the branches of US government. The fact that they have trouble passing these "protect the children" type laws QUICKLY leaves me in awe of the resilience of the American political system.
- ShabbosGoy 9y ago
  One party that is arguably one of the most divided political parties in modern US history.
  - mtgx 9y ago
    Both parties are, because people are starting to notice the limits of a two-party system. Heck, half of Americans don't even identify with either of the two parties anymore, so it's already pretty crazy that we've gotten this far without having more than 2 major parties. There are a lot of hurdles in going beyond 2 parties - hurdles set-up by the 2 main parties - but I think people will increasingly put pressure on this system until it will break. This could happen for instance through a third-party presidential candidate that takes at least second place in a general election, while one of the two main parties is relegated to third place. I think we're getting pretty close to that happening, but I don't know if it's going to happen in 2020, 2024, or 2028. But probably no later than that. There are millions of Americans who have extreme distrust in the two main parties, so "all it takes" (easier said than done) is for them to actually organize behind one candidate in an election and refusing to buy the "lesser evil" excuse that the two main parties have used for decades to keep people from fleeing to other parties.

arbie 9y ago

Is it concerning that this could be wielded as an anti-piracy measure? It is easier to take down entire file-sharing domains rather than DMCA one offending link at a time.

pasbesoin 9y ago

Monopoly (oligopoly) 101: 1) Climb. 2) Pull the ladder up behind you. I think trafficking is horrible. I also think that censorship aids abuse, including probably trafficking. Would we even be having this conversation, if decentralized conversation hadn't brought such topics into broader, public knowledge? Would Weinstein still be preying, if an open Web hadn't made an end-run around mainstream media and their "pulled" stories? Maybe apples and oranges. On the other hand, law enforcement has earned zero credibility towards their claims of apples actually being apples. In other words, where are the stories -- the facts -- demonstrating such ubiquitous surveillance and censorship actually achieving their stated goals? As well as not serving other unstated, clandestine goals and mission creep. Remember when "Internet surveillance" was strictly for and "because terrorists"? How long did that last?

comex 9y ago
> Would Weinstein still be preying, if an open Web hadn't made an end-run around mainstream media and their "pulled" stories? The Harvey Weinstein story initially broke via articles published in the New York Times and New Yorker, which are pretty much as mainstream as it gets, so… probably not? Is there something I’m missing?
- tgragnato 9y ago
  Traditional "mainstream" media are not dead, but they struggled to keep up with the challenge imposed by the new media. Readership habits changed: free content, physical vs virtual, advertisement model ... Journalistic freedom and space found (self-censorship) in the mainstream media are directly or indirectly affected by this. How many articles have not been published in the past because of the relationships with advertisers? (Hollywood is a big player in this) Now there's a different barrier for stories to get published. Sometimes it's a better thing, other times it's not.
userbinator 9y ago
Remember when "Internet surveillance" was strictly for and "because terrorists"? How long did that last? It still is. Along with children (and child porn in particular), "extremists", drugs, and other things that provoke more emotional than rational thought. These days, almost everything oppressive is done in the name of "security".

yuhong 9y ago

The most interesting stuff is about state criminal law, where each state will be different. Of course, SESTA is more than just that, but it is still an interesting question.

userbinator 9y ago

The Internet Association doesn’t represent the Internet—it represents the few companies that profit the most off of Internet activity. Reminds me of the similarly misleadingly named "Internet.org" - Facebook's walled-garden "substitute" for an actual Internet connection.

Godel_unicode 9y ago
You're aware that internet.org provides free access to Wikipedia, yes? How can you possibly object to that?
- klokoman 9y ago
  Wikipedia is extremely biased and, more important, it is not the internet. If you teach people that internet is cable tv 2.0 very bad things will happen.
  - aisofteng 9y ago
    I'm not aware of this "extreme" bias in Wikipedia. What is it?
    - oj-lappi 9y ago
      There is research comparing wikipedia to encyclopaedia britannica which concludes that wikipedia has more "left code words" per article than EB. However a) this research is very US-centric b) the paper also concludes that code word per word is pretty much equal between the two, wikipedia just has longer articles 1. https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/do-experts-or-collective-intelligence-write-with-more-bias-evidence-from-encyclopdia-britannica-and-wikipedia https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/do-experts-or-collective-intellig...
      - King-Aaron 9y ago
        I tend to feel that this research is fundamentally bullshit.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago

The Internet companies lost the high ground in regard to censorship and 3rd party speech when they tried to shutdown Daily Stormer. When Google or CloudFlare were told that the website was using their services, instead of taking the high ground with regard to the principle of free speech and 3rd party speech on their services, they used their right to free association to withdraw service. Now when you use free association to withdraw internet service that you oppose, you implicitly are saying that you endorse the services you keep. Now most people agree that if people who advocate Nazism are bad, people who actually engage in human trafficking are even worse. And if you are ok with making sure that the former are not on the Internet, you should be even more ok with keeping the latter off the Internet. This is the reason why the ACLU has historically been pretty absolutist about free speech, even defending and making sure that the government does not censorship even the most odious of speech. In the past, section 230 made sense as most of the companies had a lassez-faire attitude to speech on their services. With companies now doing more to me censor 3rd party speech on their platform, section 230 is seen as the tech companies wanting to have your cake (bot have any liability for 3rd party speech) and eat it too(be able to censor 3rd party speech whenever they want).

IBM 9y ago
>The Internet companies lost the high ground in regard to censorship and 3rd party speech when they tried to shutdown Daily Stormer. When Google or CloudFlare were told that the website was using their services, instead of taking the high ground with regard to the principle of free speech and 3rd party speech on their services, they used their right to free association to withdraw service. This lassez-faire attitude you speak of never existed. They lost the high ground the moment they started policing their platforms for spam, adult content, malware, copyrighted content, terrorist propaganda, etc., thereby expressing editorial control. They want to have it both ways, they want to absolve themselves of all responsibility (and liability) for anything that's on their platform and at the same time remove anything that is in-line with their commercial interests (for UX reasons or because their advertisers object to the content their ads run on).
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago

partycoder 9y ago

Corporations maximize shareholder value. Corporations are not your friend and are not patriotic. Don't expect corporations to have your best interest in mind, or appeal to a greater good. They exist to make themselves more profitable on a quarterly or fiscal year basis.