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The US Supreme Court doesn’t understand the internet

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

#61
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some interpretations suggest that any editorial action by a platform [...] changes them from being a common carrier to a publisher None that have been made with a straight face before a real court, that I'm aware of. That's the spin that the activists put on this, not something that anyone thinks SCOTUS is going to rule on. You're absolutely right that 230 as written doesn't really speak well to the modern semi-aut…

>You're absolutely right that 230 as written doesn't really speak well to the modern semi-automated echo chamber. Section 230 does not speak about this because section 230 wasn't supposed to care about this. Section 230 was entirely about protecting large companies from legal harm when, say, the christchurch shooter posts their spree on your platform, or someone uploads literal child porn to your platform, as long as…

This isn't a case about turning 230 into a law that it isn't supposed to be... this is a case wondering whether 230 serves as an exception to another law which does create liability here...

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

#62
If I start a TV network on basic cable and let anyone submit a video that will be broadcast live on air in real time, that network will likely be broadcasting user-submitted material that would not be allowed to be shown on TV during the daytime per FCC decency standards.

How is YouTube different than this? Or Facebook, Twitter, or any other social media that is free to see once you have an internet connection?

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

#63
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-pos…

Navigating what language? The law today I agree is pretty clear. This is speculation on a ruling that doesn't yet exist that could change all that.

Your suggestion is that there would be a carve out for spam filtering? Or that Google deciding what goes in "Promotions" and what goes in "Priority Inbox" isn't a recommendation?

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

#64
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?

My inbox is not available to the public, have public “like” counts and view counts, cannot be shared with a single click with the same viral network effects (sure, emails can be forwarded, but I think we can agree sharing emails vs sharing on social media is wildly different). So I think there’s a reasonable argument to be made about the difference here. Agree?

I'm having a hard time connecting this to Section 230. So you're saying there should be an exemption for recommending harmful content but only if the content is easier to share than forwarding an email?

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

#65
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…

I don't think it is necessary to understand how the internet works technically to "understand the internet". It's like saying a race car driver can't drive fast without understanding the physics of a piston.

I get what you're saying, but I think you might be missing the point that I'm making. DNS and BGP aren't JUST technical, they're also deeply geopolitical. The Internet isn't an accident, it's an intentionally and carefully formed set of peer autonomous networks, with a shared protocol and written (and unwritten) rules for how we name and resolve the path to get to those different networks from one another. These standards, the technical implementation of them, and how they interact with the real world is actually deeply geopolitical as well as socioeconomic. It's not just understanding how it works technically, it's understanding how it works from a policy, standardization, and governance perspective. Just like the law, how we arrived at the particular standards and policies informs the context for decisions we make about the technology and how its implemented.

Even then, without an understanding of how it works technically, it's not possible to responsibly and accurately adjudicate the law as it relates to these technologies. How BGP and DNS work is actually front and center in many court cases, where the decision rested on a basic misunderstanding, which rendered the outcome either ineffective or unjust. Think of all the cases where DNS blocking is utilized on a court order, not realizing that this is effectively meaningless and is not actually effective.

People don't often understand how deep this rabbit hole goes, even technical people who understand the basics of routing. They don't actually understand what a "peering agreement" means, especially what it means when it crosses an international border. The way that the law interacts with the Internet is an integration point that has an especially high level of complexity, and nearly no-one involved in that complexity in our current system day to day is actually qualified to discuss it.

When we have failures in this integration point is has deep reaching impacts that have broad implications for how technology continues to develop into the future, and there are both positive and negative consequences for this. As a simple example, the stupidity with courts and DNS blocking and the way in which some governments around the world behave in relation to DNS is actually a core reason why DoH and DoT exist, because misapplication of law based on misunderstanding of technology risked fundamentally breaking the basic building blocks of the Internet required for it to function and for networks to successfully interoperate, so the people who actually understand how it works had to come up with new technology to "route around" stupidity in legislatures and courts around the world. These new technologies /themselves/ have geopolitical consequences (see UK and EU stupidity regarding crypto and its implications for DoH and DoT).

It's not JUST understanding the technology, there's the 0th layer and the 8th layer in the reference model.

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

#66
post #5

I suspect Section 230 will need to be revamped or at least more thoroughly defined. Some interpretations suggest that any editorial action by a platform (aside from those required by law) changes them from being a common carrier to a publisher with all of the liability that goes with it. It only makes sense that there should be an intermediate zone where a platform provider can engage in editorialism/content restrict…

I wonder of scale of distribution would be a reasonable way to scope liability. For example, if you create a post and 50 of your friends see it, immunity for the platform. If you create a post and the platform distributes it to 1 million people, they now have publisher liability.

I think this is really smart. It reminds me of something I read within the last few months, but can't find right now, that described the descent from "social networking" (a nearly forgotten term, despite being the term for websites like Facebook just a decade ago) into the hell of modern "social media." The key difference is that social networking was about connecting with people you actually knew (realistically up to a couple hundred people), and social media is about broadcasting to the masses (measured in thousands or millions) with the help of these algorithms to promote engagement at any cost. That's where everything just went off the rails, from my perspective. I don't know why your comment got down-voted.

Edited to add: It seems like this is what distinguishes a telephone company from a television broadcaster too.

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

#67
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…

> Youtube would be in no danger if all it was doing was keyword-matching with recommended videos.

What order should those keyword matching videos come back in? By total views, by 30 day views, popularity, by upvotes, by downvotes, by keywords in the title, the description, the comments, the video itself?

Any choice made would be effectively indistinguishable from "designing the [search] to maximize engagement" as it comes to the law, since search itself is a method of surfacing new videos, and the order (even if only the default order) would matter.

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

#68

If I start a TV network on basic cable and let anyone submit a video that will be broadcast live on air in real time, that network will likely be broadcasting user-submitted material that would not be allowed to be shown on TV during the daytime per FCC decency standards. How is YouTube different than this? Or Facebook, Twitter, or any other social media that is free to see once you have an internet connection?

Here's the difference:

TV network made a deal with the government (FCC): they got a monopoly access to a limited resource (spectrum).

In exchange they agreed to limitations set by FCC, like decency standards.

Limitations that go beyond what the law, as created by congress, requires.

YouTube or Facebook didn't make a similar deal with FCC because they use unconstrained resource (internet bandwidth).

Furthermore congress did the right thing and created a law explicitly calling out this scenario and made internet companies not liable for user generated content.

Why did they do it? Because without that there would be madness.

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

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So you'd have no problems if someone defamed you?

Well, you guys are nothing if not predictable, I knew this would be the first response.

But you're living in a fantasy world if you think that I, personally, could ever recover meaningful damages from somebody with enough reach to meaningfully defame me. Rather, defamation laws are being successfully (ab)used to silence politically inconvenient people like Alex Jones.

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

#70
post #34
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. The fact you can't knowingly do business with known criminals and stolen money also makes it harder to start a new bank.

Google knowingly promoted extremist videos? Or did they take them down when made aware?

Knowingly: https://www.propublica.org/article/youtube-promised-to-label...

> YouTube decided against labeling 22 channels identified by ProPublica, but it's not entirely clear why.

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-china-uses-youtube-an...

> YouTube said the clips did not violate its community guidelines.

> The warehouse accounts on YouTube have attracted more than 480,000 views in total. People on YouTube, TikTok and other platforms have cited the testimonials to argue that all is well in Xinjiang — and received hundreds of thousands of additional views.

https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2021/04/08/google-you...

> [YouTube] even suggested videos for campaigns with terms that it clearly finds problematic, such as “great replacement.” YouTube slaps Wikipedia boxes on videos about the “the great replacement,” noting that it’s “a white nationalist far-right conspiracy theory.”

> Some of the hundreds of millions of videos that the company suggested for ad placements related to these hate terms contained overt racism and bigotry, including multiple videos featuring re-posted content from the neo-Nazi podcast The Daily Shoah, whose official channel was suspended by YouTube in 2019 for hate speech. Google’s top video suggestions for these hate terms returned many news videos and some anti-hate content—but also dozens of videos from channels that researchers labeled as espousing hate or White nationalist views.

> Even after [Google spokesperson Christopher Lawton] made that statement, 14 of the hate terms on our list—about one in six of them—remained available to search for videos for ad placements on Google Ads, including the anti-Black meme “we wuz kangz”; the neo-Nazi appropriated symbol “black sun”; “red ice tv,” a White nationalist media outlet that YouTube banned from its platform in 2019; and the White nationalist slogans “you will not replace us” and “diversity is a code word for anti-white.”

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