5 ms·

Section 230 created the internet as we know it. Don’t mess with it

41 points by ilamont 8y ago

quickthrower2 8y ago
(this comment is awaiting moderation)
- anticensor 8y ago
  (you need to wait until pg wakes up)
Mirioron 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    > 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.
- TelmoMenezes 8y ago
  > And there it is. The internet turns into cable TV. Unless (gasp) we don't use the walled gardens?
- est 8y ago
  > Thinking of the future Extremely portable packet radio is on the horizon.
neonate 8y ago
http://archive.is/JPeZv http://archive.is/JPeZv
RandomInteger4 8y ago
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.
qball 8y ago
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 8y ago
  > 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.
_0ffh 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      Small forums and comment sections can moderate themselves, no?
      - Brotkrumen 8y ago
        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.
        deleted 8y ago
CryptoPunk 8y ago
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.
DanBC 8y ago
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

41 points by ilamont 8y ago

quickthrower2 8y ago

(this comment is awaiting moderation)

anticensor 8y ago
(you need to wait until pg wakes up)

Mirioron 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  > 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.
TelmoMenezes 8y ago
> And there it is. The internet turns into cable TV. Unless (gasp) we don't use the walled gardens?
est 8y ago
> Thinking of the future Extremely portable packet radio is on the horizon.

neonate 8y ago

http://archive.is/JPeZv http://archive.is/JPeZv

RandomInteger4 8y ago

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.

qball 8y ago

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 8y ago
> 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.

_0ffh 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    Small forums and comment sections can moderate themselves, no?
    - Brotkrumen 8y ago
      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.
      - deleted 8y ago

CryptoPunk 8y ago

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.

DanBC 8y ago

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