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I view them as completely separate issues. We need 230 immunity in some form or else the whole telecommunications system falls apart (although I am a fan of Tru

I view them as completely separate issues. We need 230 immunity in some form or else the whole telecommunications system falls apart (although I am a fan of Trump's plan to make it apply only to sites following the law and removing only illegal content, as this censorship nonsense we have been dealing with for the last decade or two implies the platform knows what they are publishing and is editorializing which should make it liable, just as a newspaper is liable for what it publishes). What is charged for distribution is more of an antitrust issue to me (i.e. 20% is clearly ridiculous unless there are a bunch of reach/network effects the platform offers due to it having market power. mitigating that market power is almost always a good idea).

TZubiri 2y ago
What is charged for distribution is more of an antitrust issue to me (i.e. "20% is clearly ridiculous unless there are a bunch of reach/network effects the platform offers due to it having market power. mitigating that market power is almost always a good idea)." Now that IS a different matter and Off Topic
- snapplebobapple 2y ago
  It's not off topic. The person I was responding to was using that as an indication that they should be responsible for 20% of the liability and that is totally incorrect. I outlined what it actually was and that is not an indication of liability for wrongdoing by the users of the distribution method.
  - TZubiri 2y ago
    Yeah that was me. There's a lot of nuance in what we are saying, I feel you are not being quite precise: "The person I was responding to was using that as an indication that they should be responsible for 20% of the liability and that is totally incorrect. " I didn't say that charging 20% means you have 20% of the liability, although I don't think it's unreasonable if you posit that it follows naturally from what I said. I said that charging money for a service creates an expectation of some kind of consideration, that is something in exchange. So the company would be liable for services of value equal or close to equal to 20% of the price that the customer paid. You might argue that in the aggregate this might be close to 20% of the liability, but liabilities might be very big or they might be 0. Also the consideration itself is a liability ( an obligation to perform services) So yeah, not the same thing at all. And what I say is out of scope is saying that some price is too high, we are getting into a free market/controlled prices debate that is completely unrelated to damages of lack of consent in sex and distribution of sexual images.
    - snapplebobapple 2y ago
      And I have been correctly saying that this is foolish because it will destroy the entire internet communication industry and we get far more social benefit than drawback from said industry. If everyone has to know everything on their service then they can't let users post anything. Further, this has been well litigated already for other telecom services (i.e. for the phone company) and is why there is no liability for the telecom company if you, for example, use their cellular network to set off a bomb in a crowded area. It doesn't matter what the price is, the price is a signal of a totally separate problem, as I have already said. As I've also already said, this censorship nonsense of the last decade is indicative of editorializing and therefore in that instance it would make sense to have some liability to the platform, as they are exercising editorial control over what is being published above and beyond legality.
      - TZubiri 2y ago
        "And I have been correctly saying that this is foolish because it will destroy the entire internet communication industry and we get far more social benefit than drawback from said industry. If everyone has to know everything on their service then they can't let users post anything. Further, this has been well litigated already for other telecom services (i.e. for the phone company) and is why there is no liability for the telecom company if you, for example, use their cellular network to set off a bomb in a crowded area." I get this is the underlying gist of the debate, but it doesn't follow at all from the deep thread, which focuses on a very specific point. "It doesn't matter what the price is, the price is a signal of a totally separate problem, as I have already said. As I've also already said, this censorship nonsense of the last decade is indicative of editorializing and therefore in that instance it would make sense to have some liability to the platform, as they are exercising editorial control over what is being published above and beyond legality" I'm sorry but you have no capacity for keeping a discussion. You bring the subject of free speech and politics in what originally is a rape case with almost no relevance. Try to separate your free speech concerns to a separate top level comment or wherever it would be appropriate (probably not top level). And try to engage with the specific argument of a thread. Encapsulate, this is a nuanced topic, you can't repeat the base argument in a depth 7 comment.
TZubiri 2y ago
Regarding section 230 immunity. I think there's distributors and there's publishers, which traditionally were very distinct roles in the physical industry, a book is published by an editorial, who prints it, sells it to a book shop, and performs some content review. As such the publisher bears some responsibility for the context and not the book shop. So ISPs are undeniably distributors and do not bear liabilities for the content they distribute. This has been extended to social media like twitter, granted. The claim being that they are a distributor and that users self publish. Your argument that whenever a platform exercises their right to review and editorialize, they enter a category of publisher and thus become liable as a whole is compelling. You would hold the company in estoppel, either they are a neutral distributor as a whole, or they editorialize as a whole. Now how this relates to the onlyFans case. I'm personally not convinced this is a distributor. I believe they may be a publisher. I feel this is very similar to other companies like neobanks and uber and airbnb, or an employer using a contractor categorization, attempting on paper to be something, but effectively being something else. Legal fictions. The first element common in these legal fictions is that there's a legal relationship that bears a lot of liabilities, be that an employer relationship with taxes, a bank-client relationship with regulations, or a publisher with content liability. That incentive is present here. Second, the undesirable liability role is most likely to be assumed whenever other roles have already been fulfilled genuinely. For example: if Company A contracts worker X from Company B, then the nature of company A with worker X is that of a contractor, so whatever the relationship of worker X is with company B, there is a strong claim that it is an employer, as the contractor role is already served in that chain. Similarly, the role of neutral content distributor is already filled by the ISP and content neutral hosts. Onlyfans specifically hosts sexual content (de facto, they may allege to be a general social media platform but it is not the case in practice). So what I'm saying is that content neutral distributors can be immune from the liabilities of the content they distribute, in the sense that they are ISPs or hosts, but these immunities may not apply to some companies like content-specific last-mile distributors which would assume the role of publisher. I'm not familiar with the specifics of OF, maybe they make their best efforts to avoid being a publisher and have users sign as independent self publishers or whatever. But even if they make all of the right decisions, somebody has to be the publisher, I don't buy this self-publish legal fiction. There's a lot of elements that may constitute the publisher relationship, and charging a fee for transactions per content may be a big one.

TZubiri 2y ago

What is charged for distribution is more of an antitrust issue to me (i.e. "20% is clearly ridiculous unless there are a bunch of reach/network effects the platform offers due to it having market power. mitigating that market power is almost always a good idea)." Now that IS a different matter and Off Topic

snapplebobapple 2y ago
It's not off topic. The person I was responding to was using that as an indication that they should be responsible for 20% of the liability and that is totally incorrect. I outlined what it actually was and that is not an indication of liability for wrongdoing by the users of the distribution method.
- TZubiri 2y ago
  Yeah that was me. There's a lot of nuance in what we are saying, I feel you are not being quite precise: "The person I was responding to was using that as an indication that they should be responsible for 20% of the liability and that is totally incorrect. " I didn't say that charging 20% means you have 20% of the liability, although I don't think it's unreasonable if you posit that it follows naturally from what I said. I said that charging money for a service creates an expectation of some kind of consideration, that is something in exchange. So the company would be liable for services of value equal or close to equal to 20% of the price that the customer paid. You might argue that in the aggregate this might be close to 20% of the liability, but liabilities might be very big or they might be 0. Also the consideration itself is a liability ( an obligation to perform services) So yeah, not the same thing at all. And what I say is out of scope is saying that some price is too high, we are getting into a free market/controlled prices debate that is completely unrelated to damages of lack of consent in sex and distribution of sexual images.
  - snapplebobapple 2y ago
    And I have been correctly saying that this is foolish because it will destroy the entire internet communication industry and we get far more social benefit than drawback from said industry. If everyone has to know everything on their service then they can't let users post anything. Further, this has been well litigated already for other telecom services (i.e. for the phone company) and is why there is no liability for the telecom company if you, for example, use their cellular network to set off a bomb in a crowded area. It doesn't matter what the price is, the price is a signal of a totally separate problem, as I have already said. As I've also already said, this censorship nonsense of the last decade is indicative of editorializing and therefore in that instance it would make sense to have some liability to the platform, as they are exercising editorial control over what is being published above and beyond legality.
    - TZubiri 2y ago
      "And I have been correctly saying that this is foolish because it will destroy the entire internet communication industry and we get far more social benefit than drawback from said industry. If everyone has to know everything on their service then they can't let users post anything. Further, this has been well litigated already for other telecom services (i.e. for the phone company) and is why there is no liability for the telecom company if you, for example, use their cellular network to set off a bomb in a crowded area." I get this is the underlying gist of the debate, but it doesn't follow at all from the deep thread, which focuses on a very specific point. "It doesn't matter what the price is, the price is a signal of a totally separate problem, as I have already said. As I've also already said, this censorship nonsense of the last decade is indicative of editorializing and therefore in that instance it would make sense to have some liability to the platform, as they are exercising editorial control over what is being published above and beyond legality" I'm sorry but you have no capacity for keeping a discussion. You bring the subject of free speech and politics in what originally is a rape case with almost no relevance. Try to separate your free speech concerns to a separate top level comment or wherever it would be appropriate (probably not top level). And try to engage with the specific argument of a thread. Encapsulate, this is a nuanced topic, you can't repeat the base argument in a depth 7 comment.

TZubiri 2y ago

Regarding section 230 immunity. I think there's distributors and there's publishers, which traditionally were very distinct roles in the physical industry, a book is published by an editorial, who prints it, sells it to a book shop, and performs some content review. As such the publisher bears some responsibility for the context and not the book shop. So ISPs are undeniably distributors and do not bear liabilities for the content they distribute. This has been extended to social media like twitter, granted. The claim being that they are a distributor and that users self publish. Your argument that whenever a platform exercises their right to review and editorialize, they enter a category of publisher and thus become liable as a whole is compelling. You would hold the company in estoppel, either they are a neutral distributor as a whole, or they editorialize as a whole. Now how this relates to the onlyFans case. I'm personally not convinced this is a distributor. I believe they may be a publisher. I feel this is very similar to other companies like neobanks and uber and airbnb, or an employer using a contractor categorization, attempting on paper to be something, but effectively being something else. Legal fictions. The first element common in these legal fictions is that there's a legal relationship that bears a lot of liabilities, be that an employer relationship with taxes, a bank-client relationship with regulations, or a publisher with content liability. That incentive is present here. Second, the undesirable liability role is most likely to be assumed whenever other roles have already been fulfilled genuinely. For example: if Company A contracts worker X from Company B, then the nature of company A with worker X is that of a contractor, so whatever the relationship of worker X is with company B, there is a strong claim that it is an employer, as the contractor role is already served in that chain. Similarly, the role of neutral content distributor is already filled by the ISP and content neutral hosts. Onlyfans specifically hosts sexual content (de facto, they may allege to be a general social media platform but it is not the case in practice). So what I'm saying is that content neutral distributors can be immune from the liabilities of the content they distribute, in the sense that they are ISPs or hosts, but these immunities may not apply to some companies like content-specific last-mile distributors which would assume the role of publisher. I'm not familiar with the specifics of OF, maybe they make their best efforts to avoid being a publisher and have users sign as independent self publishers or whatever. But even if they make all of the right decisions, somebody has to be the publisher, I don't buy this self-publish legal fiction. There's a lot of elements that may constitute the publisher relationship, and charging a fee for transactions per content may be a big one.