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With safe harbour laws the concept of editorial control comes up as a legal test that courts use to determine intermediary liability. By going this route Mozill
by belorn 8y ago
With safe harbour laws the concept of editorial control comes up as a legal test that courts use to determine intermediary liability. By going this route Mozilla is now declaring that not only are they taking responsibility of what extensions they publish, but also how those extensions in turn are used by users. One level deeper of indirections.
So any site which has an EULA that forbids adblockers can use this case as a example of Mozilla exercising editorial control of extension use by users. If Mozilla is willing to exercise editorial control over users behavior for the dissenter extension, then the same apply for any other extension.
Looking in my list of extensions I can identify several which could be potential abused. I would be very sad to see the kind of restrictions that would happen if Mozilla would be forced to be liable for it.
- sintaxi 8y agoYip, in other words section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has limits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communications_Decency_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
- repolfx 8y agoThe real question in my mind is when do browser makers start directly blocking websites they believe to be bad? After all both Chrome and Firefox are made by people with very strong political views. So far they've not abused SafeBrowsing to exercise political control over the internet, but the companies producing them are willing to block or politically rerank extensions, web links, domain names they host, news they summarise and so on. How long do we have before browsing to gab.ai triggers a "This page has been blocked for your safety" page because a bunch of activists said the content made them feel unsafe?
- LyndsySimon 8y agoThis is a very good point, and one that I hadn't considered. From TFA: > When asked for more clarity on which policies Dissenter did not comply with, Mozilla said that they received abuse reports for this extension. It further added that the platform is being used for promoting violence, hate speech, and discrimination, but they failed to show any examples to add any credibility to their claims. If that's the case, who's to say that Firefox itself hasn't been used for these purposes?