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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

#121

Post by shadowgovt »

anonymouskimmer wrote: post #51
shadowgovt wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a good breakdown of the situation and arguments here ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzNo5lZCq5M ). The tl;dr is that it may not be possible to split a hair as thin as the difference between an automated recommendation algorithm and automated (or manual) moderation (if the system chooses not to put your tweets in the Trending Topics, are we refraining from up-signalling you or down-signalling you? Is "signa…

I presume that non-profit forums would be judgement proof (literal first amendment grounds). Possibly even including non-profit forums attached to a for-profit entity. With regard to Hacker News in particular the only possibly problematic element would be the YC-linked advertisement posts. Of course I'm not a lawyer. But section 230 is not the only protection here.

No; "Judgment-proof" means "too poor to be sued because there is no universe in which the costs will be repaid," not "Case too worthless to bring." Anything that is criminal liability is never judgment-proof (when jail is on the table, a defendant can always "pay" with their freedom); civil liability is judgment-proof if the defendant could never possibly scrape together the cash to make the plaintiff whole.

Basically anything First Amendment-grounded can pass the bar of worth bringing to court because the First Amendment protections are a patchwork of carve-outs, exceptions, and careful interpretations to stretch the ideal of "The government cannot constrain the people here" over the reality of "Some speech is harmful in a way that cannot be made whole."

There's nothing about being a nonprofit that prevents some Internet rando from using your forums to post massive obviously-false defamatory statements. The only thing that keeps the forums themselves from catching a lawsuit when that happens is s230.

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

#122

Post by warner25 »

tristor wrote: post #79
automatoney wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 provably not true, but widely believed. Could you debunk some of the most common/biggest false beliefs you encounter? I'm curious to see which traps I fall into.

There's so many I'm not sure where to begin. A few simple ones that most people believe about networking on the Internet that aren't true are: 1. Routing paths are primarily decided by path distance as the metric. 2. IP ownership is authenticated and therefore the global route table is deterministic and stable. 3. DNS traffic is always over UDP/53 4. DNS is controlled by the network. Related, split horizon DNS is rel…

I'm either feeling disappointed with this list, or feeling proud of myself that I can say, "Yes, of course, those things aren't true, and here's why..." I just have an expired CCNA and have taken a couple graduate-level courses on network security and traffic analysis. The only one I haven't heard of is "split horizon DNS."

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

#123

Post by kridsdale1 »

glitchc wrote: post #99
rayiner wrote: post #45

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…

Hear hear! Sounds like Wired is a mouthpiece for Big Tech.

I cancelled my WIRED subscription last week after their horribly insulting “review” of the Hogwarts game.

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

#124

Post by njharman »

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…

Newsstands, bookstores recommend items. Ones they put on front, at eye level, on the "look at this" table as you walk in. We don't typically hold them liable.

In meatspace we don't generally hold those making recommendations liable for the 3rd party content. We shouldn't online either.

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

#125

Post by kelnos »

njharman wrote: post #124
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…

Newsstands, bookstores recommend items. Ones they put on front, at eye level, on the "look at this" table as you walk in. We don't typically hold them liable. In meatspace we don't generally hold those making recommendations liable for the 3rd party content. We shouldn't online either.

If a newsstand was promoting ISIS recruitment propaganda, you better believe we'd hold that newsstand responsible for harm caused by that recommendation.

As we should, IMO.

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

#126

Post by telotortium »

rayiner wrote: post #45

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…

Also, even if the Supreme Court judges are older, the decisions are written, to a very significant degree, by the Supreme Court clerks, who are generally the very best law school grads in the US a few years out from graduation (so generally around 30).

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

#127

Post by kelnos »

bskap wrote: post #101
freejazz wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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,…

If there are 150,000 results that match your keyword, which results show up first?

If the answer to that is "results that the search engine thinks is most relevant to you", then that's probably a recommendation engine. If the answer is "results that are most recent" or even "results that many people have watched", then that probably isn't a recommendation engine.

You're acting like any kind of algorithm is automatically a recommendation engine that should terminate Section 230 protections, but I don't think it's that simple.

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

#128

Post by russellbeattie »

A legitimate result from this lawsuit would be to simply force internet companies to be more responsive. The family in question did everything they could to alert Google to the extreme content, and were completely ignored. I think anyone who has had their user ID mistakenly flagged, or app removed, or content stolen can relate to the unresponsiveness of internet companies to legitimate user complaints. It's what is driving the sense of arrogance people get from these companies, who act as though they are untouchable.

There needs to be some accountability. The "slippery slope" or "chilling effect" arguments are valid, but the scale has tipped too far so that individuals being harmed by these companies have little to no recourse.

These companies make billions of dollars in profit and much of that is because they underfund customer support, or simply ignore it all together. It's like any consumer product safety issue. It's expensive, but should be a required cost of doing business, like product recalls or EPA pollution regulations.

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

#129

Post by indymike »

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…

I remember when DCMA passed, and everyone assumed that "safe harbor" meant that if a provider moderated or policed the content, then that service would be liable. If they just allowed things to pass through, not unlike the phone company, then the company could claim safe harbor. The law was designed to shield ISPs and online services from liability for what their users did with the service, not to enable content filtering and moderation... and in many ways it is the opposite of the intent of congress, which was just trying to make it so you wouldn't be sued into oblivion because a user of your service did something bad.

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

#130

Post by spaced-out »

freejazz wrote: post #103
bskap wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there are 150,000 results that match your keyword, which results show up first?

The most recent, the oldest, the closest match? That doesn't make it a recommendation system. Maybe try and read my post and make an effort to understand it rather than just responding with the first thing that comes to mind, because it is as if you have not understood my post at all and you seem to have not made any effort thereto.

>The most recent, the oldest

Do you not recognize how lousy of a video sharing website this would be? Spammers are going to be constantly uploading marketing and other low-quality content with irrelevant keywords, while users that actually put work into making good quality videos will see their results pushed to the bottom quickly. How will you deal with that without implementing a system that can identify and recommend non-spam videos? Even the oldest versions of Youtube were boosting videos that got lots of likes.

>the closest match

How is deciding the "closest match" not considered a recommendation? They all have the user's keyword, what other criteria will you use?

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