The US Supreme Court doesn’t understand the internet • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by hnfong » Thu, Feb 23, 2023, 3:11 PM UTC

tristor wrote: post #65

billythemaniam wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stan…

You're basically just saying "I don't like the laws/decisions of XXX because they break my toys and makes my life harder". And it sounds like they're kind of breaking your toys intentionally, instead of, as you claim, "they don't understand it".

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

#182

Post by freejazz » Thu, Feb 23, 2023, 6:15 PM UTC

hnfong wrote: post #180

fortenforge wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I encourage anyone who thinks the Supreme Court is composed of 9 wordcel idiots who can't possibly understand anything about computers to read their opinion in Google v. Oracle [1]. It's very readable and well-argued. It's like a reverse Gell-Mann amnesia—clearly the author of the draft understands the issues at play quite well. [1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/18-956_d18f.pdf

Google v. Oracle is one of the most anticlimactic decisions I've read. The decision does show that the Supreme Court justices are savvy as to how the tech industry works, at least they know from a policy perspective they can't strike down the whole Android ecosystem without causing mayhem. And they know they can't affirm copyrights of APIs for similar reasons. But from a legal perspective the way they outright dodged…

To your point w/r/t Google v Oracle, the justices aren't being useful idiots, but instead, useless geniuses. Hopefully they do something of value with Warhol and the Alice cases coming up.

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

#183

Post by Nasrudith » Thu, Feb 23, 2023, 10:19 PM UTC

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…

That is a complete non-sequitur and yet people take that propaganda seriously. Section 230 says nothing about being neutral. The "whole question" is like asking if your driver's license is still valid when you are wearing a purple necktie, then asserting that drivers licenses aren't valid then because a purple tie excludes green and yellow and that ruins society and promotes pollution for the sake of privilege because purple was reserved for royals.

If you ignore the emotional manipulation sophistry and look at the logical content it looks a lot more like a thought disorder than anything else.

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

#184

Post by Retric » Fri, Feb 24, 2023, 6:39 PM UTC

pgodzin wrote: post #111

hrunt wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So if YouTube used the same deep learning models to push people to more extremist content but without using any user signals so that everyone has the same recommendations that's no longer promotion? I don't want to respond to part of your comment and not the other, so I'll just say: I don't know, because exactly defining the specifics is not my goal. > Fundamentally any decisions a site makes to filter and sort con…

I'm very unclear about what "otherwise" means in "elevating when it otherwise wouldn't be elevated". There's no natural state of how content would be displayed, any choice of how to do it would result in a moderated list that elevates something that wouldn't have otherwise been elevated with a different approach. There is no distinction to me between what YouTube and HN do, and I certainly don't think the law should…

Moderation is selecting based on the content. Aka not every letter to the editor gets shown it comes down to the editors views on each letter.

Simple orderings like chronological are not considered moderated because the content doesn’t define the order.

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

#185

Post by circuit10 » Sun, Feb 26, 2023, 3:07 PM UTC

Zak wrote: post #26

circuit10 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could they fix that? If it was that easy to reliably identify illegal/extremist content and prevent it from being recommended they’d just take it down

The obvious options if targeted recommendations are found not to be protected is to only use them with curated content (Netflix) or not use them (reddit).

That will completely destroy the experience of using YouTube for many people, the reason I like it is because I can see really niche content that has a really small target audience. With curated recommendations I wouldn't discover that type of thing at all, which would be bad for both me and the creators, and with no recommendations it would be even harder to find it. Reddit does target recommendations, by the way, though maybe it's just based on what subreddits you joined so maybe that isn't the same thing as the user chose to receive it

(I'm not trying to imply that YouTube should work how specially I want it to, just using myself as an example of what I think many people use it for)