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The US Supreme Court doesn’t understand the internet

wired.com

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Re: The US Supreme Court doesn’t understand the internet

#41

Post by hrunt »

eli wrote: post #23
Retric wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn’t the definition it’s that companies want the common carrier status without actually acting like one. The phone company doesn’t editorialize and we would think it insane if they started doing so.

You would want Hacker News or any other forum to be legally responsible for comments posted by users?

No, I would not want HN legally responsible for comments posted by users.

Hacker News does not directly promote content (aside from prioritizing content based on non-content factors [age, voting, etc.]). It does moderate, but that is not the same as promotion.

The crux of the argument in this case is that the plaintiffs want Google held liable for promoting content, not hosting it. The difficulty the Supreme Court seems to have is understanding what the boundaries are between promoting content and simply delivering a usable view of content choices to consumers, and whether Congress intended for that difference to matter with regards to Section 230.

Is Hacker News default feed that promotes highly-upvoted, newer stories to the front of the list and example of HN promoting those stories? If so, should HN be held liable if that algorithm pushes content that harms others?

Re: The US Supreme Court doesn’t understand the internet

#42

Post by eli »

prepend wrote: post #39
eli wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google decides what emails go in the gmail inbox vs spam folder vs rejected outright. Should they be legally responsible if an offensive email lands in your inbox?

I don’t think spam filtering is promoting content as it is removing material. I think they would be liable if they took emails that weren’t addressed to you and showed them in your inbox and it did some harm. Or if they showed an ad that did some harm.

I would challenge you to craft a legal opinion around 230 that excludes Youtube recommending harmful content from protection but not Google placing harmful content in the "Priority Inbox".

Re: The US Supreme Court doesn’t understand the internet

#43

Post by commandlinefan »

eli wrote: post #23
Retric wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn’t the definition it’s that companies want the common carrier status without actually acting like one. The phone company doesn’t editorialize and we would think it insane if they started doing so.

You would want Hacker News or any other forum to be legally responsible for comments posted by users?

Personally, I would want nobody to be "legally responsible" for comments posted by anybody or rather, I disagree that there should ever be any legal repercussions of any kind for something somebody just said.

Re: The US Supreme Court doesn’t understand the internet

#44

Post by freejazz »

ladyattis wrote: post #10
causi wrote: post #9

Whether Section 230(c)(1) of the Communications Decency Act immunizes interactive computer services when they make targeted recommendations of information provided by another information content provider Should it? This feels a lot like a "have your cake and eat it too" situation. Either you're a neutral party or you are not. Being a trillion-dollar company doesn't exempt you from that. Letting a computer make the de…

The thing is that the law as written allows them to do just that. If they don't like your content on YouTube, they can punt it instantly. And it can be for ANY REASON. And that's not even including their first amendment right to refuse distributing or listing your content.

What does that have to do with the affirmative act they undertake of promoting certain materials? That's the issue - not that they punt thing, but that they promote things and that promoting things isn't the same as just hosting third party uploaded content. They take that third party content and show it to people to generate interest and advertising revenue. That's not the same thing as blindly hosting.

Re: The US Supreme Court doesn’t understand the internet

#45

Post by rayiner »

The Wired article’s title is frustrating. I’m pretty sure the Supreme Court does “understand the internet.” The judge I clerked for wrote the original decision that struck down most of the CDA except Section 230, which the Supreme Court later affirmed. If you go read that decision, it’s got a pretty accurate description of the internet: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/we... (see Findings of Fact).

For example it talks about routing:

> “The Internet uses ‘packet switching’ communication protocols that allow individual messages to be subdivided into smaller ‘packets’ that are then sent independently to the destination, and are then automatically reassembled by the receiving computer. While all packets of a given message often travel along the same path to the destination, if computers along the route become overloaded, the packets can be re-routed to less loaded computers.”

And that was back in the 1990s. What people seem to really mean when they say “the Supreme Court doesn’t understand X” is that the Supreme Court doesn’t share the values they associate with X. That’s almost certainly the case. From the Supreme Court’s view, the internet is just another part of the national economy. They don’t understand or care about the distinct cultural values of people in that sector.

Re: The US Supreme Court doesn’t understand the internet

#46

Post by koboll »

tristor wrote: post #33

The reality is that most people, EVEN technical people, don't actually understand the Internet. The only people I consistently have conversed with who understand the Internet are technology advocates that have a deep background in Internet networking. Even on HN, most people believe many things about how the Internet works, at the networking layer, at the application layer, and socioculturally, that are not true, and…

>The reality is that most people, EVEN technical people, don't actually understand the Internet.

Nothing gives me Gell-Mann amnesia quite like the comments that get upvoted on HN posts relevant to the particular area in which I work...

Re: The US Supreme Court doesn’t understand the internet

#47

Post by freejazz »

spaced-out wrote: post #37
causi wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they don't like your content on YouTube, they can punt it instantly. And it can be for ANY REASON Certainly. But Section 230, at least from my reading, does not protect them for the promotion of content. I could be wrong about that. The Supreme Court will decide. Personally I'd find it delightful if the rage-engine got smashed with a legal hammer and my Youtube recommendations were as useful as they were fifteen y…

>Personally I'd find it delightful if the rage-engine got smashed with a legal hammer and my Youtube recommendations were as useful as they were fifteen years ago. Why would it be safe for them to use an older recommendation system? It doesn't solve the problem, if their older system recommends a terrorism video, even if it only did so because that video came up chronologically, they're still liable. I would think th…

>Why would it be safe for them to use an older recommendation system? It doesn't solve the problem, if their older system recommends a terrorism video, even if it only did so because that video came up chronologically, they're still liable.

A system that keyword matches isn't making recommendations, it's just keyword matching based upon the user's request. The law actually cares about intent and how things function, not just hypothetical possibilities that can occur, i.e. the law cares about what does happen and why it happens that way. So it's pointless to characterize a non-recommendation system as a recommendation system as a means of end-running an argument.

Re: The US Supreme Court doesn’t understand the internet

#48

Post by boh »

The article doesn't really explain what it is about the internet that isn't being understood. Even if these companies have been identified under the general "tech" category by investment firms, they're essentially media companies and there's no reason why they should be exempt from the regulations of other media companies. The idea that somehow first amendment rights will somehow be overtly compromised by adding extra responsibilities for internet companies would require us to ignore the censorship these companies have been willfully prompting in the past decade.

Re: The US Supreme Court doesn’t understand the internet

#49

Post by freejazz »

eli wrote: post #42
prepend wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think spam filtering is promoting content as it is removing material. I think they would be liable if they took emails that weren’t addressed to you and showed them in your inbox and it did some harm. Or if they showed an ad that did some harm.

I would challenge you to craft a legal opinion around 230 that excludes Youtube recommending harmful content from protection but not Google placing harmful content in the "Priority Inbox".

There isn't difficulty there. Lawyers aren't having problems navigating this language. Obtuse techies who obsess over edge-cases definitions are having difficulty. No one reasonable would describe the SPAM filtering as a recommendation algorithm and to suggest otherwise is either outright ignorant or just facially disingenuous. The law doesn't care what can be argued to be a promotion algorithm based upon some HN-poster's obtuse reliance upon a specific word, the law deals with reasonability as a standard all the time.

Re: The US Supreme Court doesn’t understand the internet

#50

Post by hrunt »

eli wrote: post #42
prepend wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think spam filtering is promoting content as it is removing material. I think they would be liable if they took emails that weren’t addressed to you and showed them in your inbox and it did some harm. Or if they showed an ad that did some harm.

I would challenge you to craft a legal opinion around 230 that excludes Youtube recommending harmful content from protection but not Google placing harmful content in the "Priority Inbox".

IANAL, but I would start developing my argument with the idea that emails Google placed in my Priority Inbox were sent to me specifically, and the intention of the sender is that I specifically would see it. Google is still not putting anything in front of my eyes that was not intended to be there anyway.

When YouTube recommends content to me, the original author did not target that content specifically to me, and YouTube alone is making the decision to put it in front of my eyes.

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