9 ms·

Section 230: A Key Legal Shield for Facebook, Google Is About to Change

291 points by Mononokay 9y ago

elorant 9y ago
Why do they mention Google on the title? Google doesn't rely on content. It's sites like Reddit that will take a big hit. As for Facebook, you can always report a user.
- jkaplowitz 9y ago
  YouTube, a Google subsidiary, very much relies on content and has been saved many times by both Section 230 (against defamation claims) and the DMCA's safe harbor provisions (against copyright infringement contributory liability claims). Note: while I worked for Google in the past, I had no involvement with anything I mention in this comment and am not speaking for them here.
- fenwick67 9y ago
  Google's core business is advertising, and advertising is likely also considered 'content' in this context.
mankash666 9y ago
This law is not good for the internet. This isn't about Google and Facebook, it's about the open internet as we know it. And, it's high time we recognize these services to be "infrastructure". You don't persecute the street owner for vehicles that drive on it - if you could, the state would be liable for all crimes involving a vehicle
- showerst 9y ago
  I disagree here. Child porn and trafficking are always the arguments used to go after free speech on the internet in the court of public opinion. If we narrowly edit the law to specifically go after those cases, then it creates less opportunities for scandal later that end in much broader restriction. Also -- although it should go without saying, those things are actually bad! So if an unintended interpretation is making them easier, clarifying (with as little collateral damage as possible) that is congress' job.
  - randomerr 9y ago
    A government will always its power. That is why you give it as little as possible and let the people tackle the social issues.
    - geofft 9y ago
      What are the legitimate functions of government? Possibly relatedly (depending on whether you think it's a legitimate function of government to be the answer to this question), what sort of social issues may the people tackle, and with what sort of power, and how is abusive vigilante justice prevented? Should Reddit refuse to allow people to arrange for sales of alcohol using their site as a communication platform, because underage people might buy beer? (This is a new policy from approximately yesterday: https://redd.it/863xcj https://redd.it/863xcj ) Should the CEO of Cloudflare, bending to public pressure, refuse to serve Nazis on ideological grounds? Should a religious person with a genuine belief that abortion is murder be allowed to use deadly force to stop an abortion clinic? Should the Black Panthers be allowed to bear arms in public whenever Oakland police are in black neighborhoods, in order to dissuade the government from abusing its power? (Ronald "nine most terrifying words" Reagan signed the act that made this illegal.)
      - Mononokay 9y ago
        > Should Reddit refuse to allow people to arrange for sales of alcohol using their site as a communication platform, because underage people might buy beer? To be fair, they're doing that in reaction to Sec 230.
        geofft 9y ago
        Sure. But that's ultimately because the government has defined that facilitating beer sales to people under 21 is illegal. If the government decided to stay out of drug regulation entirely, would it be reasonable for companies like Reddit to decide on their own that people under some age should not be able to purchase beer online, set that age, etc.? (Presumably, because there is not overwhelming public support to repeal those laws, society at large believes that young people should be prevented, passive voice, from buying beer - if we move enforcement of that social problem to the people, how should that get implemented?)
- ronilan 9y ago
  > This law is not good for the internet. The law is good for people. “The internet” is not a member of society. It is “infrastructure”. If the law allows roads to be built in a way that systematically hurt people, you change the law. Well done US Congress!
  - gnode 9y ago
    The Internet can be colloquially interpreted to mean the community of Internet users. The isn't necessarily the same as society in general, and for the purpose of argument, it is useful to distinguish community that is specifically enabled by the Internet. To extend your road analogy, lawmakers can regulate roads in ways that uniquely harm the motoring community, in the name of protecting society at large.
  - jasonlotito 9y ago
    It's already made clear this law will hurt people. Also, the current law already allowed people to fight the abuses presented by this law. This will do far more damage.
- danjoc 9y ago
  >This law is not good for the internet. It's not bad or good. It's new rules, and people will figure out how to play by them. If hosts become more liable for what people say, maybe we all go back to self hosting. In my opinion, that would be a net positive, if you can excuse the pun. Right now, the rules allow corporations to control speech. I think less of that is a good idea.
- jstarfish 9y ago
  The difference is that in this case, the street owner was explicitly notified (made aware of) the fact that Immortan Joe was using his road to rape and plunder, and the street owner responded by providing cover for these activities instead of stopping them. Backpage (allegedly...) played an active role in conducting sex traffic by posting its own ads and modifying third-party ads for child prostitutes to make them less obvious to authorities. Like Silk Road, there is no deniability-- they know damn well what business they're in, so they don't get to play the "b-b-but we were just running a website!" defense.
  - danjoc 9y ago
    Snapchat should be on notice. They're in the same business. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-yaverbaum/is-snapchat-peddling-porn_b_6826444.html https://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-yaverbaum/is-snapchat-pe...
  - ensignavenger 9y ago
    And what they were doing was illegal under existing laws- no need for new ones- unless Congress is just using Backpage as a smokescreen to hide their real motives.
  - acabal 9y ago
    Sure, and now Backpage is being prosecuted under current law, which is how the justice system should work. Do we really need another law to tighten the stranglehold on the entire internet, when current laws were apparently already enough to prosecute Backpage?
    - jstarfish 9y ago
      I totally agree; I don't understand why they've had so much trouble applying existing law to this problem that we need new ones now.
      - coldacid 9y ago
        Because governments will always do whatever they can to expand their powers at the expense of the citizens they are supposed to serve.
- gowld 9y ago
  This is an old problem for hotel owners: http://articles.latimes.com/1994-06-08/local/me-1830_1_motel-owners http://articles.latimes.com/1994-06-08/local/me-1830_1_motel...
- eli_gottlieb 9y ago
  >And, it's high time we recognize these services to be "infrastructure". You don't persecute the street owner for vehicles that drive on it - if you could, the state would be liable for all crimes involving a vehicle Sure, but a public street is state-owned. A public street agency doesn't profit from trying to convince the right kind of people to drive on it with the right kind of cars so it can market things to them or charge tolls. I oppose this law for the same reason as you, but it would be better to just admit that vital network infrastructure of the common-carrier kind shouldn't be reliant on feeding eyeballs to advertisers and manipulating users.
- majormajor 9y ago
  A webpage or app is not infrastructure, even if the underlying network is.
- forgottenpass 9y ago
  Services that decide to implement their own, private, content based restrictions on speech have already ceded their primary and strongest argument to be considered "infrastructure".
  - notriddle 9y ago
    Agreed. Hacker News is definitely not a form of infrastructure, while GMail clearly is (even though it technically does have some content filtering, it's obviously necessary to make the service usable). But there are gray-areas between websites with a full-blown CoC and apps that are deliberately compared to the Postal Service. Where do you draw the line?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
showerst 9y ago
Here's the bill: https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1865 https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1865 The current version seems to be narrowly written to only apply to sex trafficking.
- chaostheory 9y ago
  If it passes, it'll be inevitable for its scope to expand beyond sex trafficking - little by little.
  - bsamuels 9y ago
    do you have evidence that something like that has happened before with such a specifically worded bill?
    - cm2187 9y ago
      I still remember the UK using the anti-terrorism act to seize funds from Icelandic banks in 2008. Iceland doesn't strike me as a terrorist nation. If laws can be abused they will be abused.
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
  and sex work generally. “Sex trafficking” is used as an excuse for a broader crackdown, forcing sex workers further underground and into more dangerous situations.
- bitwize 9y ago
  As far as the Feds (and some states) are concerned, all prostitution is trafficking. Did you pay for a prostitute's Uber home after your hook-up? Congratulations, you've engaged in "human trafficking". Enjoy your long prison sentence.
- kbenson 9y ago
  The bill seems at once too specific and too broad. Too specific in that it targets sex trafficking and prostitution narrowly, but too broad in that if you run the site and someone uses it for that, it doesn't seem to matter whether you had any idea it was happening or not. In other words, it looks like some politicians saw a topic they could exploit for political points and we're yet again stuck with crappy legislation because they couldn't be bothered to do the real part of their job, which is examine the topic in depth and make considered, useful legislation.
olivermarks 9y ago
Rana Faroohar has been writing good commentary on this topic and big tech's broader problems in the Financial Times From December last year 'Why Big Tech wants to keep the net neutral' - good on explaining tensions between net neutrality and section 230 https://www.ft.com/content/a06bedd2-e1ae-11e7-8f9f-de1c2175f5ce https://www.ft.com/content/a06bedd2-e1ae-11e7-8f9f-de1c2175f...
temuze 9y ago
This is a pretty awkward headline. For a moment, I thought Google was "A Key Legal Shield for Facebook".
- cmpolis 9y ago
  a,b in news headlines often means "a and b"... this seems to be a vestige of print news, where headline space is limited.
- joemi 9y ago
  It's a newspaper-style headline. I'm not really sure why NPR decided to title it that way on the web, though.
jokoon 9y ago
It's weird how some bits of data can be made illegal. I understand that having child pornography on one's computer should be forbidden because it encourage its distribution, but it's clear that the concept of data is difficult to define. Intellectual property laws are already difficult to enforce, but the whole concept of forbidden data because it's illegitimate shows that technology is really creating problems for the law.
- mkirklions 9y ago
  The true intent is to make it usable against political enemies.
  - jessaustin 9y ago
    Yeah the only real way to avoid this charge is to never possess a computing device.
rayiner 9y ago
This bill is a complete disaster. Sometimes the EFF can be a bit dramatic; this is not one of those times. It's every bit as bad as they say it is. Here is the text: https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1865/text https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1865... The key is 18 U.S.C. 1591. That statute creates criminal liability for those who use force or coercion to cause someone to engage in a commercial sex act, or anyone who "benefits, financially or by receiving anything of value, from participation in a venture" to do so. 18 U.S.C. 1591(a)(2). So far so good. You can get the guy who runs the sex trafficking business, not just the grunt who uses the force. The bill amends 18 USC 1591(e) to state: "The term ‘participation in a venture’ means knowingly assisting, supporting, or facilitating a violation" of the foregoing provision. One, this is grammatical lunacy. "Participation in a venture" means what you think it means: people who participate with intent to further the criminal enterprise. The bill amends section 1591 to define "participation in a venture" quite differently from its plain meaning. It's like a law that says: "as herein used, 'green' means green as well as blue and purple." Two, what the heck does "knowingly facilitate" mean? Is it enough to know that, in the abstract, your service is used to facilitate sex trafficking? Because its guaranteed that services like gmail are used to facilitate sex trafficking. You couldn't say otherwise with a straight face. Or do you have actually intend your service to facilitate sex trafficking (like backpage arguably was doing)? If that was the intention, the drafters really screwed up because "knowing" is a lower standard than "intent." You learn that in the first year of law school.
- jstarfish 9y ago
  > Two, what the heck does "knowingly facilitate" mean? Historically this has been rather clear. Take the Silk Road. Arguably just an eBay clone on the dark web, right? Except the proprietor specifically marketed it for the trade of drugs. There was no question about what its intended purpose was; he created it to sell drugs, internal documents show he knew drug trade was going on; by all accounts, he knowingly participated in the venture. There was a small ISP somewhere in NY. Authorities notified them that they were hosting child porn provided by a customer. No biggie, right? Section 230 and all. Except they didn't take action to remove it, which put them in the camp of...knowingly participating in its possession/distribution. They got fined. Backpage is in the same camp. They know what's going on, even contributing to it. They knowingly participate in the venture.
Communitivity 9y ago
This bill worries me greatly. INAL, but could one interpretation allow the US government to go after anyone running technology supporting the BitCoin blockchain, if BTC is used by hackers, drug dealers, etc., along with the many legitimate uses?
- coldacid 9y ago
  Yes.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
coldacid 9y ago
The companies the least at risk from the Section 230 changes are the ones that need the most government oversight. I applaud the excuse for amending 230, but both the real reasons and the actual amendment themselves are no good at all.
zaroth 9y ago
My understanding is that documented evidence exists that Backpage.com directly intervened and edited “user postings” which were flagged as potentially underage, to make them less obviously illegal. And that their direct knowledge and moderation of the postings makes the Section 230 liability moot. So why is someone like NPR which certainly should know better raising the specter of Section 230 protecting abetters of child sex trafficking when in fact it does not? I expect a much more reasoned argument from “unbiased media sources” for a proposal to change a law which is universally regarded as having ushered in the modern internet. In the case of Backpage.com, if anything it was allowed to exist all the better to be able to track and analyze the data in the open rather than have it move to a modern dark-web platform which would be much more difficult to track. Since all technology can be used for good or evil in equal proportion, it’s clear the best technology can also be used for the worst evil. The most private, distributed, and secure social network would be at once a boon for law abiding and law breaking citizens alike. You can’t make the tool work for one and not the other, without compromise. The legal standard for years has been if you can demonstrate sufficient legal use of a tool and that you haven’t intentionally solicited illegal uses then it passes muster. I am greatly concerned by any legislation which shifts the balance because great tech will always be used by bad actors. I.e. Since the Bitcoin blockchain can be used to pass messages between parties anonymously then anyone running a node on the network could be supporting anonymous message passing for any purpose, obviously including underage prostitution. That doesn’t mean you shut down Bitcoin. The government would love to make it illegal for any technology to exist which doesn’t provide them the means to inspect it and control it. But providing those same means would deeply compromise any attempt to implement a truly private and secure distributed network. I worry that the 1st amendment could be compromised to allow for such a law.
ideasman 9y ago
I know this would never happen, but if google really wanted to fight this they could shut down gmail for everyone indefinitely while they scanned all the email for evidence of human trafficking. Maybe someone can think of a solution along these lines that would similarly grab public attention but be more realistically something google bosses might sign off on.
ikeboy 9y ago
>Congress should revisit the law, he says, and "make the statute longer and make it crystal clear." >Cox draws this distinction of websites like Backpage — involved or connected with their content — and sites that are "pure intermediaries." He wouldn't say whether that term applied to Facebook or Google How can you write both sentences with a straight face? "I think the law should be more transparent but I won't tell you what it will mean"
sqdbps 9y ago
It's not just a shield for Facebook and Google it's a shield for every website and app out there,and it's the greatest facilitator of free speech online. Not only did the headline conveniently omit that fact but the whole pieces was edited to make it seem like only zealots and anarchists have any interest in preserving section 230. Senator Wyden who voted against SESTA was trying to convey that this change is unwise and short sighted and will actually hurt the efforts to combat human trafficking yet only his criticism of tech firms survived the edit. It's a great irony that the press keeps calling for limits on speech online perhaps hoping that when everyone else is silenced theirs will be the only voice heard.
ianamartin 9y ago
I fully expect various hacker groups to have a field day with this after it goes into effect. It will be a whole new world of swatting. Find someone you don't like online, crack their website, place offensive material on it, call the internet police. Worse yet, government agencies just gained a new tool to take down and ruin any technology individual or technology company they don't happen to like even easier than ever before. The concept of competence as a politician has come up now as a talking point for the first time I can remember in a sustained way. And I think there's plenty of room to talk about someone besides Trump in that light. This bill is written so unbelievably poorly that no one knows what it means. At least not the people who wrote it and support it. Everyone pushing for it has a different take on what the standard of knowledge means and what the intent of the bill is. This bill is either intended to be misused in the worst possible ways (in which case, the people pushing it are bad actors and lying about what they want it to accomplish) or they are utterly incapable of writing effective legislation--they are incompetent. I'm going to laugh my ass off if these corrupt politicians start using the law against each other and hiring people to fuck up rival's websites and tie them up in criminal proceedings. I certainly wouldn't shed any tears if Paul Ryan suddenly found himself in front of a jury arguing that he didn't knowingly facilitate child porn on his congressional website just because it was sitting there unnoticed for 6 months.
ocdtrekkie 9y ago
It isn't a popular statement, but I'm super excited about this, and if anything, this didn't go far enough. Section 230 needs to be removed in it's entirety. As Matt Stoller from the Open Markets Institute put it last night, this is the first time that big tech has ever really lost in Congress. One example that stuck out to me recently was Google's participation in the drug rehab scam market. The Verge called them out on it repeatedly, and Google finally stopped doing it. https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/7/16257412/rehabs-near-me-google-search-scam-florida-treatment-centers https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/7/16257412/rehabs-near-me-go... As noted in the article, Google was making as much as $230 per click. While they knew a lot of the ads they were selling were scams, the market was extremely lucrative for them, they were bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars with it. They even had marketers specifically catering to building the rehab ad market. Thanks to Section 230, Google can't be held responsible for scams that they knowingly continued to support and fostered the growth of... and made hundreds of millions of dollars from. Even though Google's pulled the drug rehab ads now, all that profit is still theirs to keep, even though it should really go to some sort of victim's compensation fund. Tech companies have shown repeatedly they can't be trusted with blanket immunity from prosecution, and it's time to take it away.
- devnill 9y ago
  Should gun manufacturers be liable for shootings? Car manufacturers for hit and runs? What about the USPS for when people ship drugs or other illegal contraband? This seems like an awfully slippery slope where companies are are not only responsible for their own actions, but also for the actions of their customers as well.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    If gun owners are actively advertising to people they perceive to be likely mass shooters: Yes. There's just so much here. They actively encouraged the practice, they made hundreds of millions of dollars on it, and the perverse incentive of a bidding war caused by all these scammers mean that despite knowing about the problem, Google had no desire to fix it.
Sephr 9y ago
I wonder if security vulnerabilities will be found in the resultant eventual legally-required filter software…
owly 9y ago
When I was a sysadmin, I had several discoveries of incidents of employees saving and sharing child pornography. Luckily caught them due to an embedded virus in content. Note: CAN’T UNSEE!! I can’t imagine the guilt if I did not report them to the authorities and supply evidence to the police. Honestly, I’d have felt like I “knowingly facilitated” their actions since I managed the corporate network. Websites like backpage know what they’re doing and should fucking burn.
intrasight 9y ago
Make me think of my days as a landlord when the government started making laws to persecute landlords for drug dealing going on in their properties. Like those failed laws, this one just doesn't pass the smell test. Even Google, with their awesome AI, can't police their platform. And why should they? We pay the police to be the police.
walterbell 9y ago
How will Section 230 changes affect Bitcoin’s blockchain? https://gizmodo.com/child-pornography-that-researchers-found-in-the-blockch-1823927566 https://gizmodo.com/child-pornography-that-researchers-found... "The researchers write, “our analysis shows that certain content, e.g., illegal pornography, can render the mere possession of a blockchain illegal.” ... As the researchers note, “Since all blockchain data is downloaded and persistently stored by users, they are liable for any objectionable content added to the blockchain by others,” which is likely true under many countries’ laws. The researchers continue, “Consequently, it would be illegal to participate in a blockchain-based system as soon as it contains illegal content.”
wtfstatists 9y ago
Why is state outsourcing the job they are getting paid taxes for and expecting private sector to do it for free ?
Rebelgecko 9y ago
It looks like this is why Craigslist deleted their personals section. I wonder if some dating sites are going to go down completely?
sharemywin 9y ago
Don't kid yourself it's the small guy just starting out that's screwed. Not the global giants with armies of lawyers. In fact wonder if HN is facilitating with it's current moderation policies.

291 points by Mononokay 9y ago

Why do they mention Google on the title? Google doesn't rely on content. It's sites like Reddit that will take a big hit. As for Facebook, you can always report a user.

jkaplowitz 9y ago
YouTube, a Google subsidiary, very much relies on content and has been saved many times by both Section 230 (against defamation claims) and the DMCA's safe harbor provisions (against copyright infringement contributory liability claims). Note: while I worked for Google in the past, I had no involvement with anything I mention in this comment and am not speaking for them here.
fenwick67 9y ago
Google's core business is advertising, and advertising is likely also considered 'content' in this context.

mankash666 9y ago

This law is not good for the internet. This isn't about Google and Facebook, it's about the open internet as we know it. And, it's high time we recognize these services to be "infrastructure". You don't persecute the street owner for vehicles that drive on it - if you could, the state would be liable for all crimes involving a vehicle

showerst 9y ago
I disagree here. Child porn and trafficking are always the arguments used to go after free speech on the internet in the court of public opinion. If we narrowly edit the law to specifically go after those cases, then it creates less opportunities for scandal later that end in much broader restriction. Also -- although it should go without saying, those things are actually bad! So if an unintended interpretation is making them easier, clarifying (with as little collateral damage as possible) that is congress' job.
- randomerr 9y ago
  A government will always its power. That is why you give it as little as possible and let the people tackle the social issues.
  - geofft 9y ago
    What are the legitimate functions of government? Possibly relatedly (depending on whether you think it's a legitimate function of government to be the answer to this question), what sort of social issues may the people tackle, and with what sort of power, and how is abusive vigilante justice prevented? Should Reddit refuse to allow people to arrange for sales of alcohol using their site as a communication platform, because underage people might buy beer? (This is a new policy from approximately yesterday: https://redd.it/863xcj https://redd.it/863xcj ) Should the CEO of Cloudflare, bending to public pressure, refuse to serve Nazis on ideological grounds? Should a religious person with a genuine belief that abortion is murder be allowed to use deadly force to stop an abortion clinic? Should the Black Panthers be allowed to bear arms in public whenever Oakland police are in black neighborhoods, in order to dissuade the government from abusing its power? (Ronald "nine most terrifying words" Reagan signed the act that made this illegal.)
    - Mononokay 9y ago
      > Should Reddit refuse to allow people to arrange for sales of alcohol using their site as a communication platform, because underage people might buy beer? To be fair, they're doing that in reaction to Sec 230.
      - geofft 9y ago
        Sure. But that's ultimately because the government has defined that facilitating beer sales to people under 21 is illegal. If the government decided to stay out of drug regulation entirely, would it be reasonable for companies like Reddit to decide on their own that people under some age should not be able to purchase beer online, set that age, etc.? (Presumably, because there is not overwhelming public support to repeal those laws, society at large believes that young people should be prevented, passive voice, from buying beer - if we move enforcement of that social problem to the people, how should that get implemented?)
ronilan 9y ago
> This law is not good for the internet. The law is good for people. “The internet” is not a member of society. It is “infrastructure”. If the law allows roads to be built in a way that systematically hurt people, you change the law. Well done US Congress!
- gnode 9y ago
  The Internet can be colloquially interpreted to mean the community of Internet users. The isn't necessarily the same as society in general, and for the purpose of argument, it is useful to distinguish community that is specifically enabled by the Internet. To extend your road analogy, lawmakers can regulate roads in ways that uniquely harm the motoring community, in the name of protecting society at large.
- jasonlotito 9y ago
  It's already made clear this law will hurt people. Also, the current law already allowed people to fight the abuses presented by this law. This will do far more damage.
danjoc 9y ago
>This law is not good for the internet. It's not bad or good. It's new rules, and people will figure out how to play by them. If hosts become more liable for what people say, maybe we all go back to self hosting. In my opinion, that would be a net positive, if you can excuse the pun. Right now, the rules allow corporations to control speech. I think less of that is a good idea.
jstarfish 9y ago
The difference is that in this case, the street owner was explicitly notified (made aware of) the fact that Immortan Joe was using his road to rape and plunder, and the street owner responded by providing cover for these activities instead of stopping them. Backpage (allegedly...) played an active role in conducting sex traffic by posting its own ads and modifying third-party ads for child prostitutes to make them less obvious to authorities. Like Silk Road, there is no deniability-- they know damn well what business they're in, so they don't get to play the "b-b-but we were just running a website!" defense.
- danjoc 9y ago
  Snapchat should be on notice. They're in the same business. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-yaverbaum/is-snapchat-peddling-porn_b_6826444.html https://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-yaverbaum/is-snapchat-pe...
- ensignavenger 9y ago
  And what they were doing was illegal under existing laws- no need for new ones- unless Congress is just using Backpage as a smokescreen to hide their real motives.
- acabal 9y ago
  Sure, and now Backpage is being prosecuted under current law, which is how the justice system should work. Do we really need another law to tighten the stranglehold on the entire internet, when current laws were apparently already enough to prosecute Backpage?
  - jstarfish 9y ago
    I totally agree; I don't understand why they've had so much trouble applying existing law to this problem that we need new ones now.
    - coldacid 9y ago
      Because governments will always do whatever they can to expand their powers at the expense of the citizens they are supposed to serve.
gowld 9y ago
This is an old problem for hotel owners: http://articles.latimes.com/1994-06-08/local/me-1830_1_motel-owners http://articles.latimes.com/1994-06-08/local/me-1830_1_motel...
eli_gottlieb 9y ago
>And, it's high time we recognize these services to be "infrastructure". You don't persecute the street owner for vehicles that drive on it - if you could, the state would be liable for all crimes involving a vehicle Sure, but a public street is state-owned. A public street agency doesn't profit from trying to convince the right kind of people to drive on it with the right kind of cars so it can market things to them or charge tolls. I oppose this law for the same reason as you, but it would be better to just admit that vital network infrastructure of the common-carrier kind shouldn't be reliant on feeding eyeballs to advertisers and manipulating users.
majormajor 9y ago
A webpage or app is not infrastructure, even if the underlying network is.
forgottenpass 9y ago
Services that decide to implement their own, private, content based restrictions on speech have already ceded their primary and strongest argument to be considered "infrastructure".
- notriddle 9y ago
  Agreed. Hacker News is definitely not a form of infrastructure, while GMail clearly is (even though it technically does have some content filtering, it's obviously necessary to make the service usable). But there are gray-areas between websites with a full-blown CoC and apps that are deliberately compared to the Postal Service. Where do you draw the line?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

showerst 9y ago

Here's the bill: https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1865 https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1865 The current version seems to be narrowly written to only apply to sex trafficking.

chaostheory 9y ago
If it passes, it'll be inevitable for its scope to expand beyond sex trafficking - little by little.
- bsamuels 9y ago
  do you have evidence that something like that has happened before with such a specifically worded bill?
  - cm2187 9y ago
    I still remember the UK using the anti-terrorism act to seize funds from Icelandic banks in 2008. Iceland doesn't strike me as a terrorist nation. If laws can be abused they will be abused.
TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
and sex work generally. “Sex trafficking” is used as an excuse for a broader crackdown, forcing sex workers further underground and into more dangerous situations.
bitwize 9y ago
As far as the Feds (and some states) are concerned, all prostitution is trafficking. Did you pay for a prostitute's Uber home after your hook-up? Congratulations, you've engaged in "human trafficking". Enjoy your long prison sentence.
kbenson 9y ago
The bill seems at once too specific and too broad. Too specific in that it targets sex trafficking and prostitution narrowly, but too broad in that if you run the site and someone uses it for that, it doesn't seem to matter whether you had any idea it was happening or not. In other words, it looks like some politicians saw a topic they could exploit for political points and we're yet again stuck with crappy legislation because they couldn't be bothered to do the real part of their job, which is examine the topic in depth and make considered, useful legislation.

olivermarks 9y ago

Rana Faroohar has been writing good commentary on this topic and big tech's broader problems in the Financial Times From December last year 'Why Big Tech wants to keep the net neutral' - good on explaining tensions between net neutrality and section 230 https://www.ft.com/content/a06bedd2-e1ae-11e7-8f9f-de1c2175f5ce https://www.ft.com/content/a06bedd2-e1ae-11e7-8f9f-de1c2175f...

temuze 9y ago

This is a pretty awkward headline. For a moment, I thought Google was "A Key Legal Shield for Facebook".

cmpolis 9y ago
a,b in news headlines often means "a and b"... this seems to be a vestige of print news, where headline space is limited.
joemi 9y ago
It's a newspaper-style headline. I'm not really sure why NPR decided to title it that way on the web, though.

jokoon 9y ago

It's weird how some bits of data can be made illegal. I understand that having child pornography on one's computer should be forbidden because it encourage its distribution, but it's clear that the concept of data is difficult to define. Intellectual property laws are already difficult to enforce, but the whole concept of forbidden data because it's illegitimate shows that technology is really creating problems for the law.

mkirklions 9y ago
The true intent is to make it usable against political enemies.
- jessaustin 9y ago
  Yeah the only real way to avoid this charge is to never possess a computing device.

rayiner 9y ago

This bill is a complete disaster. Sometimes the EFF can be a bit dramatic; this is not one of those times. It's every bit as bad as they say it is. Here is the text: https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1865/text https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1865... The key is 18 U.S.C. 1591. That statute creates criminal liability for those who use force or coercion to cause someone to engage in a commercial sex act, or anyone who "benefits, financially or by receiving anything of value, from participation in a venture" to do so. 18 U.S.C. 1591(a)(2). So far so good. You can get the guy who runs the sex trafficking business, not just the grunt who uses the force. The bill amends 18 USC 1591(e) to state: "The term ‘participation in a venture’ means knowingly assisting, supporting, or facilitating a violation" of the foregoing provision. One, this is grammatical lunacy. "Participation in a venture" means what you think it means: people who participate with intent to further the criminal enterprise. The bill amends section 1591 to define "participation in a venture" quite differently from its plain meaning. It's like a law that says: "as herein used, 'green' means green as well as blue and purple." Two, what the heck does "knowingly facilitate" mean? Is it enough to know that, in the abstract, your service is used to facilitate sex trafficking? Because its guaranteed that services like gmail are used to facilitate sex trafficking. You couldn't say otherwise with a straight face. Or do you have actually intend your service to facilitate sex trafficking (like backpage arguably was doing)? If that was the intention, the drafters really screwed up because "knowing" is a lower standard than "intent." You learn that in the first year of law school.

jstarfish 9y ago
> Two, what the heck does "knowingly facilitate" mean? Historically this has been rather clear. Take the Silk Road. Arguably just an eBay clone on the dark web, right? Except the proprietor specifically marketed it for the trade of drugs. There was no question about what its intended purpose was; he created it to sell drugs, internal documents show he knew drug trade was going on; by all accounts, he knowingly participated in the venture. There was a small ISP somewhere in NY. Authorities notified them that they were hosting child porn provided by a customer. No biggie, right? Section 230 and all. Except they didn't take action to remove it, which put them in the camp of...knowingly participating in its possession/distribution. They got fined. Backpage is in the same camp. They know what's going on, even contributing to it. They knowingly participate in the venture.

Communitivity 9y ago

This bill worries me greatly. INAL, but could one interpretation allow the US government to go after anyone running technology supporting the BitCoin blockchain, if BTC is used by hackers, drug dealers, etc., along with the many legitimate uses?

coldacid 9y ago
Yes.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

coldacid 9y ago

The companies the least at risk from the Section 230 changes are the ones that need the most government oversight. I applaud the excuse for amending 230, but both the real reasons and the actual amendment themselves are no good at all.

zaroth 9y ago

My understanding is that documented evidence exists that Backpage.com directly intervened and edited “user postings” which were flagged as potentially underage, to make them less obviously illegal. And that their direct knowledge and moderation of the postings makes the Section 230 liability moot. So why is someone like NPR which certainly should know better raising the specter of Section 230 protecting abetters of child sex trafficking when in fact it does not? I expect a much more reasoned argument from “unbiased media sources” for a proposal to change a law which is universally regarded as having ushered in the modern internet. In the case of Backpage.com, if anything it was allowed to exist all the better to be able to track and analyze the data in the open rather than have it move to a modern dark-web platform which would be much more difficult to track. Since all technology can be used for good or evil in equal proportion, it’s clear the best technology can also be used for the worst evil. The most private, distributed, and secure social network would be at once a boon for law abiding and law breaking citizens alike. You can’t make the tool work for one and not the other, without compromise. The legal standard for years has been if you can demonstrate sufficient legal use of a tool and that you haven’t intentionally solicited illegal uses then it passes muster. I am greatly concerned by any legislation which shifts the balance because great tech will always be used by bad actors. I.e. Since the Bitcoin blockchain can be used to pass messages between parties anonymously then anyone running a node on the network could be supporting anonymous message passing for any purpose, obviously including underage prostitution. That doesn’t mean you shut down Bitcoin. The government would love to make it illegal for any technology to exist which doesn’t provide them the means to inspect it and control it. But providing those same means would deeply compromise any attempt to implement a truly private and secure distributed network. I worry that the 1st amendment could be compromised to allow for such a law.

ideasman 9y ago

I know this would never happen, but if google really wanted to fight this they could shut down gmail for everyone indefinitely while they scanned all the email for evidence of human trafficking. Maybe someone can think of a solution along these lines that would similarly grab public attention but be more realistically something google bosses might sign off on.

ikeboy 9y ago

>Congress should revisit the law, he says, and "make the statute longer and make it crystal clear." >Cox draws this distinction of websites like Backpage — involved or connected with their content — and sites that are "pure intermediaries." He wouldn't say whether that term applied to Facebook or Google How can you write both sentences with a straight face? "I think the law should be more transparent but I won't tell you what it will mean"

sqdbps 9y ago

It's not just a shield for Facebook and Google it's a shield for every website and app out there,and it's the greatest facilitator of free speech online. Not only did the headline conveniently omit that fact but the whole pieces was edited to make it seem like only zealots and anarchists have any interest in preserving section 230. Senator Wyden who voted against SESTA was trying to convey that this change is unwise and short sighted and will actually hurt the efforts to combat human trafficking yet only his criticism of tech firms survived the edit. It's a great irony that the press keeps calling for limits on speech online perhaps hoping that when everyone else is silenced theirs will be the only voice heard.

ianamartin 9y ago

I fully expect various hacker groups to have a field day with this after it goes into effect. It will be a whole new world of swatting. Find someone you don't like online, crack their website, place offensive material on it, call the internet police. Worse yet, government agencies just gained a new tool to take down and ruin any technology individual or technology company they don't happen to like even easier than ever before. The concept of competence as a politician has come up now as a talking point for the first time I can remember in a sustained way. And I think there's plenty of room to talk about someone besides Trump in that light. This bill is written so unbelievably poorly that no one knows what it means. At least not the people who wrote it and support it. Everyone pushing for it has a different take on what the standard of knowledge means and what the intent of the bill is. This bill is either intended to be misused in the worst possible ways (in which case, the people pushing it are bad actors and lying about what they want it to accomplish) or they are utterly incapable of writing effective legislation--they are incompetent. I'm going to laugh my ass off if these corrupt politicians start using the law against each other and hiring people to fuck up rival's websites and tie them up in criminal proceedings. I certainly wouldn't shed any tears if Paul Ryan suddenly found himself in front of a jury arguing that he didn't knowingly facilitate child porn on his congressional website just because it was sitting there unnoticed for 6 months.

ocdtrekkie 9y ago

It isn't a popular statement, but I'm super excited about this, and if anything, this didn't go far enough. Section 230 needs to be removed in it's entirety. As Matt Stoller from the Open Markets Institute put it last night, this is the first time that big tech has ever really lost in Congress. One example that stuck out to me recently was Google's participation in the drug rehab scam market. The Verge called them out on it repeatedly, and Google finally stopped doing it. https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/7/16257412/rehabs-near-me-google-search-scam-florida-treatment-centers https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/7/16257412/rehabs-near-me-go... As noted in the article, Google was making as much as $230 per click. While they knew a lot of the ads they were selling were scams, the market was extremely lucrative for them, they were bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars with it. They even had marketers specifically catering to building the rehab ad market. Thanks to Section 230, Google can't be held responsible for scams that they knowingly continued to support and fostered the growth of... and made hundreds of millions of dollars from. Even though Google's pulled the drug rehab ads now, all that profit is still theirs to keep, even though it should really go to some sort of victim's compensation fund. Tech companies have shown repeatedly they can't be trusted with blanket immunity from prosecution, and it's time to take it away.

devnill 9y ago
Should gun manufacturers be liable for shootings? Car manufacturers for hit and runs? What about the USPS for when people ship drugs or other illegal contraband? This seems like an awfully slippery slope where companies are are not only responsible for their own actions, but also for the actions of their customers as well.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  If gun owners are actively advertising to people they perceive to be likely mass shooters: Yes. There's just so much here. They actively encouraged the practice, they made hundreds of millions of dollars on it, and the perverse incentive of a bidding war caused by all these scammers mean that despite knowing about the problem, Google had no desire to fix it.

Sephr 9y ago

I wonder if security vulnerabilities will be found in the resultant eventual legally-required filter software…

owly 9y ago

When I was a sysadmin, I had several discoveries of incidents of employees saving and sharing child pornography. Luckily caught them due to an embedded virus in content. Note: CAN’T UNSEE!! I can’t imagine the guilt if I did not report them to the authorities and supply evidence to the police. Honestly, I’d have felt like I “knowingly facilitated” their actions since I managed the corporate network. Websites like backpage know what they’re doing and should fucking burn.

intrasight 9y ago

Make me think of my days as a landlord when the government started making laws to persecute landlords for drug dealing going on in their properties. Like those failed laws, this one just doesn't pass the smell test. Even Google, with their awesome AI, can't police their platform. And why should they? We pay the police to be the police.

walterbell 9y ago

How will Section 230 changes affect Bitcoin’s blockchain? https://gizmodo.com/child-pornography-that-researchers-found-in-the-blockch-1823927566 https://gizmodo.com/child-pornography-that-researchers-found... "The researchers write, “our analysis shows that certain content, e.g., illegal pornography, can render the mere possession of a blockchain illegal.” ... As the researchers note, “Since all blockchain data is downloaded and persistently stored by users, they are liable for any objectionable content added to the blockchain by others,” which is likely true under many countries’ laws. The researchers continue, “Consequently, it would be illegal to participate in a blockchain-based system as soon as it contains illegal content.”

wtfstatists 9y ago

Why is state outsourcing the job they are getting paid taxes for and expecting private sector to do it for free ?

Rebelgecko 9y ago

It looks like this is why Craigslist deleted their personals section. I wonder if some dating sites are going to go down completely?

sharemywin 9y ago

Don't kid yourself it's the small guy just starting out that's screwed. Not the global giants with armies of lawyers. In fact wonder if HN is facilitating with it's current moderation policies.