> use a paid commenting service that would come with moderation. Note that a side effect of this is that you would no longer have moderation control yourself.

> use a paid commenting service that would come with moderation. Note that a side effect of this is that you would no longer have moderation control yourself. And how many of those paid services would exist, given the legal costs of running them? What makes you think there wouldn't in practice be the same centralization that we see today -- one or two paid services that handle moderation for the entire Internet because only they have the lawyers necessary to do so. The only difference would be that every independent forum that didn't use them would be opening themselves up to significant legal risk. At least right now if I set up a forum with Open Source software on a Linode server, I don't need to worry that turning off Google Captcha or avoiding a 3rd-party centralized service for my comments will get me sued.