4 ms·

Gonzalez vs. Google: What’s at Stake for Wikipedia?

24 points by jaredwiener 4y ago

ocdtrekkie 4y ago
The entirety of Section 230 defense is "blanket immunity is fundamental to us, because it would cost us money if we had to go to court when someone thought we did something wrong", like every other type of business industry in existence. Yes, Internet companies will have to go to court more. That's a good thing. It means there will be more actual legal precedent around how content should be handled, and it will mean companies will be more careful about doing things that are legally defensible, rather than solely focusing on what's profitable. Donald Trump was elected President because sensationalism and radicalization drives engagement, and hence, ad impressions. The waves of mass shootings from incels and other radical right weirdos is on Section 230s head. And every single tech industry funded outfit defending it has blood on their hands because of it. All of these amicus brief defenses come down to "we're afraid we might get sued", and if that's the case, maybe companies should rethink how they operate. Contrary to the positions of Mike Masnick and his ilk, US law isn't arbitrarily and capriciously going to attack anyone who's comment box gets spammed one day. Intent is a core part of law, and you need it to find someone responsible for most wrongdoing. Tech companies have ill intent. They've chosen profit over responsibility, because the immunity granted by Section 230 makes that decision too easy. The current Supreme Court is awful and will do a lot of awful things, but stomping down Section 230 with absolute indiscretion will not be one of those awful things. Kinda a sidebar, but I always love to see who actually is behind these sorts of things: The law firm behind this brief, Cooley LLP, appears to be a business entirely focused around things awful for consumers: Mergers and acquisitions, private equity firms, defense against shareholder litigation, protecting healthcare companies from regulatory investigations, and filing patent infringement lawsuits. They are quite proud of all of this on their home page. Wikimedia picked great friends here.
- junofan 4y ago
  You think without Section 230 more people would’ve voted for Hillary Clinton? Come on. We have 2020 as a counterfactual. Also, Cooley’s more a general tech law firm.
  - ocdtrekkie 4y ago
    I'm just going off the stats they're proud of on their about page: https://www.cooley.com/about https://www.cooley.com/about It looks like they pride themselves in helping corporations get away with bad behavior. I'm not a fan of Hillary Clinton by any means, but she fits in the run of the mill space of career politicians that more or less are trying to keep the ship running. It's a stark difference from massive amounts of racist and sexist hatred, and I don't think Donald Trump could've won the election without the massive boost the social engagement of controversies around him drove.
- just-ok 4y ago
  > Yes, Internet companies will have to go to court more. That's a good thing. Isn’t this textbook regulatory capture? Only companies that can afford to go to court will continue to exist. Or move to IPFS, I guess. We should do a better job as a society in using the Web as a tool rather than letting the Web use us as attention engines. We used to tell people “don’t believe everything you read on the Internet,” “don’t message strangers,” and “Mom hang up the phone I’m trying to play Quake!” Maybe we should bring that mindset back rather than trying to make hosting user content financially infeasible.
  - ocdtrekkie 4y ago
    So, there's a thing that once you look for you see everywhere in these arguments: The giant corporations' first claim is that regulating them will hurt small companies. They say this all the time, about every regulation. Of course, since companies act with self-interest, if it really helped them and hurt smaller competitors, they would be for the law. Claims regulating big businesses hurt small businesses are without merit and should be discarded. The law has, and can continue to develop, reasonable laws that protect people from frivolous lawsuits. Anti-SLAPP laws are key, and we should continue to raise penalties on larger players using them to bully smaller companies. And bear in mind, the cost of lawyers is... pretty relative to the business in question. If Microsoft and Joe's Blog go to court, Microsoft's spending 300x the cost on their lawyers, and if the case is completely bull----, Joe is still going to win on merits of the case. Blanket immunity isn't really a solution here, and thousands of people have died over the past few decades of experimenting with allowing it. But I guess those deaths were worth it if it saved someone some legal fees.
- flipbrad 4y ago
  How long do you think sites like Hacker News or non-profit Mastodon instances, would exist, in your vision of the economy?
  - ocdtrekkie 4y ago
    Quite a bit longer than Facebook would. Because those are examples of communities where content is not moderated based on profitability, and best efforts are made to protect the community and deal with bad actors. (There's claims, of course, that HN moderates in manners to protect YC's business, but I don't feel that's significant, if it happens at all. YC definitely doesn't benefit financially from increased engagement on HN, so they have no reason to deliberately promote harm.)
    - int_19h 4y ago
      "Best efforts" are not going enough for a community of this size to withstand a targeted attack (basically, spamming illegal content) - which is going to happen if such an attack could lead to actual legal trouble rather than inconvenience of the spam itself. The only realistic thing they can do in that case is to lock down or at least throttle new user registration.
      - ocdtrekkie 4y ago
        I mean, that's what they should do in that case. That would be a best effort mitigation to abusive spam. ...It's also probably what they would do even if they didn't face legal liability for it, because being on a community with a barrage of spam isn't fun.
LudwigNagasena 4y ago
> While Gonzalez tries to distinguish “recommendations” from “publishing,” we argue that does not make logical sense. This is because Gonzalez’s definition of a recommendation is so broad that it covers nearly any attempt to arrange, curate, or organize content. However, without arrangement and curation, content on the internet would be disorganized, full of spam and irrelevant information, and useless to readers. Nobody would be able to find what they were looking for. It simply is not possible to publish things without also organizing and curating what you are publishing in some fashion. No? It is very easy and possible. Domain registrars and web hosting providers can do that, but they cannot? Either you curate and endorse the content or you are free from liability. That sounds simple and reasonable. You can't have your cake and eat it.
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  > Domain registrars and web hosting providers can do that How would a website like YouTube look with this model? Those organizations don’t have to provide search or offer content. No one goes to Namecheap to find a website, and no one goes to AWS to see something to watch. YouTube doesn’t need to endorse a video to put it in your feed. There’s too many videos for there not to be some sort of algorithm to determine what content to show, even if it’s chronologically or by views or something. You can’t have YouTube without a way to organize the content. You can’t have search without some sort of heuristic to search against. The issue in my opinion is not the algorithm to curate and organize content but instead the decision to moderate content ex post-facto instead of at upload time. A post-230 YouTube is one where any video can be found by URL but only vetted videos can be suggested to you.
  - LudwigNagasena 4y ago
    I don't know how it should look exactly but diffusion of responsibility until no one is accountable doesn't sound right either.
vineyardmike 4y ago
> According to Section 230, the host of a website is not treated as the publisher of anything uploaded by the website’s users and, therefore, cannot be sued over what users upload. I fully support protections of Wikipedia, they are a gift to society. Section 230 protects YouTube (Google) from the bad content users upload. There is a statistic floating around that 400 minutes of content get uploaded to YouTube every minute. This would obviously not be possible if Google had to be liable for the content, because its too much content to manually review. I myself instinctively defend that this is how the internet works, and governments shouldn't intervene because we need this to be how internet businesses work. I don't think I've ever questioned if its a good thing that Youtube gets so much content that it's impossible to review. Obviously a lot of good has come out of it, like the entire YouTuber industry, and social media, but is it the "natural" way things should be? What would the internet look like if companies couldn't do mass aggregation? Surely people would still be social, so maybe they'd just use smaller services, would they be federated, or would there be more 1x1 chatting? Surely people would still share content and media, but would that mean more hosting instead of using Facebook et al? Or would people need digital mailboxes that they had at home and were always online? I'm not saying this is the future we want or a good future, but as someone involved in the tech industry, I've never truly probed the question of what would be.
LocalH 4y ago
Part of the problem is the need to put something in front of people who go to Youtube and other such platforms. Perhaps if there was no "algorithm" to give you "suggestions" as to what to watch, there wouldn't be this need to consider the platforms to be liable for what users upload. Present a bare search bar to guests/new users, sort of like the main Google interface and as users view and subscribe to channels, just show them their actual subscriptions, instead of commingling suggestions with subscriptions, leading to confusion about which channels are actually subscribed to (I like to consider myself fairly savvy, and more than once I have found I wasn't actually subscribed to a channel that I watched quite regularly). Stop suggesting things to people based on what they've already watched, and maybe you could legitimately argue "we're not directing people to content, we're merely allowing them to search for content they wish to view". As long as a platform is making suggestions as to what to show users, it could be argued that they should use that power for "good" and be liable when videos are surfaced that are "bad", for various incompatible definitions of "good" and "bad". It's not unprecedented for a privately-owned location to nonetheless be told "you may not censor anyone based on the message they wish to spread". There's no reason why a system couldn't be developed to make the actual uploader of the content the one that is liable, and few people have the wherewithal or the capability to have airtight opsec.

24 points by jaredwiener 4y ago

The entirety of Section 230 defense is "blanket immunity is fundamental to us, because it would cost us money if we had to go to court when someone thought we did something wrong", like every other type of business industry in existence. Yes, Internet companies will have to go to court more. That's a good thing. It means there will be more actual legal precedent around how content should be handled, and it will mean companies will be more careful about doing things that are legally defensible, rather than solely focusing on what's profitable. Donald Trump was elected President because sensationalism and radicalization drives engagement, and hence, ad impressions. The waves of mass shootings from incels and other radical right weirdos is on Section 230s head. And every single tech industry funded outfit defending it has blood on their hands because of it. All of these amicus brief defenses come down to "we're afraid we might get sued", and if that's the case, maybe companies should rethink how they operate. Contrary to the positions of Mike Masnick and his ilk, US law isn't arbitrarily and capriciously going to attack anyone who's comment box gets spammed one day. Intent is a core part of law, and you need it to find someone responsible for most wrongdoing. Tech companies have ill intent. They've chosen profit over responsibility, because the immunity granted by Section 230 makes that decision too easy. The current Supreme Court is awful and will do a lot of awful things, but stomping down Section 230 with absolute indiscretion will not be one of those awful things. Kinda a sidebar, but I always love to see who actually is behind these sorts of things: The law firm behind this brief, Cooley LLP, appears to be a business entirely focused around things awful for consumers: Mergers and acquisitions, private equity firms, defense against shareholder litigation, protecting healthcare companies from regulatory investigations, and filing patent infringement lawsuits. They are quite proud of all of this on their home page. Wikimedia picked great friends here.

junofan 4y ago
You think without Section 230 more people would’ve voted for Hillary Clinton? Come on. We have 2020 as a counterfactual. Also, Cooley’s more a general tech law firm.
- ocdtrekkie 4y ago
  I'm just going off the stats they're proud of on their about page: https://www.cooley.com/about https://www.cooley.com/about It looks like they pride themselves in helping corporations get away with bad behavior. I'm not a fan of Hillary Clinton by any means, but she fits in the run of the mill space of career politicians that more or less are trying to keep the ship running. It's a stark difference from massive amounts of racist and sexist hatred, and I don't think Donald Trump could've won the election without the massive boost the social engagement of controversies around him drove.
just-ok 4y ago
> Yes, Internet companies will have to go to court more. That's a good thing. Isn’t this textbook regulatory capture? Only companies that can afford to go to court will continue to exist. Or move to IPFS, I guess. We should do a better job as a society in using the Web as a tool rather than letting the Web use us as attention engines. We used to tell people “don’t believe everything you read on the Internet,” “don’t message strangers,” and “Mom hang up the phone I’m trying to play Quake!” Maybe we should bring that mindset back rather than trying to make hosting user content financially infeasible.
- ocdtrekkie 4y ago
  So, there's a thing that once you look for you see everywhere in these arguments: The giant corporations' first claim is that regulating them will hurt small companies. They say this all the time, about every regulation. Of course, since companies act with self-interest, if it really helped them and hurt smaller competitors, they would be for the law. Claims regulating big businesses hurt small businesses are without merit and should be discarded. The law has, and can continue to develop, reasonable laws that protect people from frivolous lawsuits. Anti-SLAPP laws are key, and we should continue to raise penalties on larger players using them to bully smaller companies. And bear in mind, the cost of lawyers is... pretty relative to the business in question. If Microsoft and Joe's Blog go to court, Microsoft's spending 300x the cost on their lawyers, and if the case is completely bull----, Joe is still going to win on merits of the case. Blanket immunity isn't really a solution here, and thousands of people have died over the past few decades of experimenting with allowing it. But I guess those deaths were worth it if it saved someone some legal fees.
flipbrad 4y ago
How long do you think sites like Hacker News or non-profit Mastodon instances, would exist, in your vision of the economy?
- ocdtrekkie 4y ago
  Quite a bit longer than Facebook would. Because those are examples of communities where content is not moderated based on profitability, and best efforts are made to protect the community and deal with bad actors. (There's claims, of course, that HN moderates in manners to protect YC's business, but I don't feel that's significant, if it happens at all. YC definitely doesn't benefit financially from increased engagement on HN, so they have no reason to deliberately promote harm.)
  - int_19h 4y ago
    "Best efforts" are not going enough for a community of this size to withstand a targeted attack (basically, spamming illegal content) - which is going to happen if such an attack could lead to actual legal trouble rather than inconvenience of the spam itself. The only realistic thing they can do in that case is to lock down or at least throttle new user registration.
    - ocdtrekkie 4y ago
      I mean, that's what they should do in that case. That would be a best effort mitigation to abusive spam. ...It's also probably what they would do even if they didn't face legal liability for it, because being on a community with a barrage of spam isn't fun.

LudwigNagasena 4y ago

> While Gonzalez tries to distinguish “recommendations” from “publishing,” we argue that does not make logical sense. This is because Gonzalez’s definition of a recommendation is so broad that it covers nearly any attempt to arrange, curate, or organize content. However, without arrangement and curation, content on the internet would be disorganized, full of spam and irrelevant information, and useless to readers. Nobody would be able to find what they were looking for. It simply is not possible to publish things without also organizing and curating what you are publishing in some fashion. No? It is very easy and possible. Domain registrars and web hosting providers can do that, but they cannot? Either you curate and endorse the content or you are free from liability. That sounds simple and reasonable. You can't have your cake and eat it.

vineyardmike 4y ago
> Domain registrars and web hosting providers can do that How would a website like YouTube look with this model? Those organizations don’t have to provide search or offer content. No one goes to Namecheap to find a website, and no one goes to AWS to see something to watch. YouTube doesn’t need to endorse a video to put it in your feed. There’s too many videos for there not to be some sort of algorithm to determine what content to show, even if it’s chronologically or by views or something. You can’t have YouTube without a way to organize the content. You can’t have search without some sort of heuristic to search against. The issue in my opinion is not the algorithm to curate and organize content but instead the decision to moderate content ex post-facto instead of at upload time. A post-230 YouTube is one where any video can be found by URL but only vetted videos can be suggested to you.
- LudwigNagasena 4y ago
  I don't know how it should look exactly but diffusion of responsibility until no one is accountable doesn't sound right either.

vineyardmike 4y ago

> According to Section 230, the host of a website is not treated as the publisher of anything uploaded by the website’s users and, therefore, cannot be sued over what users upload. I fully support protections of Wikipedia, they are a gift to society. Section 230 protects YouTube (Google) from the bad content users upload. There is a statistic floating around that 400 minutes of content get uploaded to YouTube every minute. This would obviously not be possible if Google had to be liable for the content, because its too much content to manually review. I myself instinctively defend that this is how the internet works, and governments shouldn't intervene because we need this to be how internet businesses work. I don't think I've ever questioned if its a good thing that Youtube gets so much content that it's impossible to review. Obviously a lot of good has come out of it, like the entire YouTuber industry, and social media, but is it the "natural" way things should be? What would the internet look like if companies couldn't do mass aggregation? Surely people would still be social, so maybe they'd just use smaller services, would they be federated, or would there be more 1x1 chatting? Surely people would still share content and media, but would that mean more hosting instead of using Facebook et al? Or would people need digital mailboxes that they had at home and were always online? I'm not saying this is the future we want or a good future, but as someone involved in the tech industry, I've never truly probed the question of what would be.

LocalH 4y ago

Part of the problem is the need to put something in front of people who go to Youtube and other such platforms. Perhaps if there was no "algorithm" to give you "suggestions" as to what to watch, there wouldn't be this need to consider the platforms to be liable for what users upload. Present a bare search bar to guests/new users, sort of like the main Google interface and as users view and subscribe to channels, just show them their actual subscriptions, instead of commingling suggestions with subscriptions, leading to confusion about which channels are actually subscribed to (I like to consider myself fairly savvy, and more than once I have found I wasn't actually subscribed to a channel that I watched quite regularly). Stop suggesting things to people based on what they've already watched, and maybe you could legitimately argue "we're not directing people to content, we're merely allowing them to search for content they wish to view". As long as a platform is making suggestions as to what to show users, it could be argued that they should use that power for "good" and be liable when videos are surfaced that are "bad", for various incompatible definitions of "good" and "bad". It's not unprecedented for a privately-owned location to nonetheless be told "you may not censor anyone based on the message they wish to spread". There's no reason why a system couldn't be developed to make the actual uploader of the content the one that is liable, and few people have the wherewithal or the capability to have airtight opsec.