> and so wanted the ability to "have their cake and eat it too": to be able to decide almost on a whim to take down content Not really. Sure the telcos can't

> and so wanted the ability to "have their cake and eat it too": to be able to decide almost on a whim to take down content Not really. Sure the telcos can't sensor individual phone calls, but if they don't like what you are doing they will disconnect you. For example my telco explicitly prohibits me from sending spam over SMS. If I break that, they disconnect me. It costs me money to reconnect which is a huge disincentive to spammers, but more than that, they insist on knowing who I am, that have a "true name" in other words. So not only can they disconnect me, they can ensure I never reconnect. Two differences with an internet bulletin board is the users are anonymous and posting is free. Thus the owners can never effectively ban people that deliberately set out to harm their business, they can only deal with the posts as they occur. Or to put in another way: until you read his post, you can never know if a new user is a spammer and it cost him nothing to post his spam. The difference between a telco and an internet web site is really competition, and it's curcial. It costs billions (trillions?) to set up a telco. Worse, there is typically no local competition for land line (and really just a hand full of mobile providers too). So your local land like provider bans you, it's as if you've lost your town water supply, or electricity connection. In that environment a telco shutting you down is indeed total censorship. That's not true for the internet. There are literally thousands if not millions of outlets. If one does not like your post, another one surely will. Since there is no monopoly you are always able to publish somewhere so no one one person or company can shut you up. In fact, it's not difficult to build your own publishing forum and it costs peanuts, so in fact _no one_ except the government can prevent you from having your say. 230 struck a new bargain for this new environment. What arose under its protection was curated forums targeting particular consumers. Stuff the consumers didn't like (such as SPAM, or bullshit, or leftist, or abusive) it is removed. Because the cost of creating the forum is so cheap the competition for eyeballs is fierce, and what ends up dictating the success of these forums is not whether they agree with posts or their political views, it is how well their curation matches their target market. This equation has been spelt out here on HN time and time again, with comments like "Twitter must have judged the cost of letting Trump post bullshit higher than the readership it gained". So, 230 solved the "free speech" problem using capitalist competition in its purest form. Where "pure" near zero friction, and a market with near perfect information flow between participants. It seems to work pretty well to me. It's pretty clear these amendments, g.5(c) in particular, will destroy that balance.