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 central

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/