Sunsetting Section 230 Will Hurt Internet Users, Not Big Tech
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Re: Sunsetting Section 230 Will Hurt Internet Users, Not Big Tech
#2"The law is not a shield for Big Tech."
No, but it protects the public from the emergence of more "Big Tech" companies and the so-calleed "tech" companies, hoping for an "exit", that they they acquire to stay dominant in perpetuity.
Google's lawyer argued to the US Supreme Court that Section 230 is what allowed it and other "Big Tech" companies to grow so large.
Section 230 protects centralisation. An absence of Section 230 might help decentralisation.
Re: Sunsetting Section 230 Will Hurt Internet Users, Not Big Tech
#3I remember the Internet before 230, and it was fine.
Re: Sunsetting Section 230 Will Hurt Internet Users, Not Big Tech
#4What impact would the loss of 230 have on p2p? Would a bitcoin node operator become liable for criminal transactions people make? Would Tor nodes become even riskies than they are to run? Would participating in the torrent DHT become risky even if I only torrent Linux isos?
Re: Sunsetting Section 230 Will Hurt Internet Users, Not Big Tech
#5I remember the Internet before 230, and it was fine.
Sesta and fosta reduced 230 a bit and had a measurable impact on web freedom. Craigslist removed personals, most notably.
Re: Sunsetting Section 230 Will Hurt Internet Users, Not Big Tech
#6"The law is not a shield for Big Tech." No, but it protects the public from the emergence of more "Big Tech" companies and the so-calleed "tech" companies, hoping for an "exit", that they they acquire to stay dominant in perpetuity. Google's lawyer argued to the US Supreme Court that Section 230 is what allowed it and other "Big Tech" companies to grow so large. Section 230 protects centralisation. An absence of Sect…
230 may have helped Google grow big, but it also helps small operators from being liable for something they can't have resources to police. The fallacy in your argument is this: https://www.dhmo.org/
Re: Sunsetting Section 230 Will Hurt Internet Users, Not Big Tech
#7If they sunset Section 230, they should also sunset the entire DMCA.
That law was a compromise between giving copyright holders all sorts of new powers (DRM, takedown notices, etc), and allowing tech companies to create monopoly platforms (via Section 230) by making it legal() for them to centralize speech (and therefore censorship) on their platforms.
Without the DMCA, we wouldn’t have sites like YouTube or Facebook, and I argue that’d be a good thing. Instead, people would need to self-host their videos, etc. The price of that is approaching zero, but software hasn’t made it easy enough to go those routes (and economic incentives prevent companies from investing in such things).
Anyway, the DMCA without Section 230 will have the effect of further centralizing control over online speech. It won’t end well.
() it was technically legal before the DMCA, but only if you were willing to take on unbounded legal liability.
Re: Sunsetting Section 230 Will Hurt Internet Users, Not Big Tech
#8"The law is not a shield for Big Tech." No, but it protects the public from the emergence of more "Big Tech" companies and the so-calleed "tech" companies, hoping for an "exit", that they they acquire to stay dominant in perpetuity. Google's lawyer argued to the US Supreme Court that Section 230 is what allowed it and other "Big Tech" companies to grow so large. Section 230 protects centralisation. An absence of Sect…
Correction:
s/but it protects/but its sunsetting would protect/
Re: Sunsetting Section 230 Will Hurt Internet Users, Not Big Tech
#9> If Congress deletes Section 230, the pre-digital legal rules around distributing content would kick in. That law strongly discourages services from moderating or even knowing about user-generated content.
This frankly sounds like a good thing to me. And if there is a side effect that it is no longer easy to build a forum without taking on some liability for the content--the same as any real-world offline forum would have to--that also doesn't sound like a bad thing.
The EFF frankly has a broken, unimaginative, and even obsolete take on this issue: one which insists that the specific way we went about building centralized moderation with built-in traffic surveillance is somehow the only way any of it ever could have worked :/.
The reality is that it isn't the late 90s anymore: we have peer-to-peer network protocols and end-to-end encryption and we now even finally have AI user agents in our toolbox... incentives that cause platforms to "avoid even knowing about user-generated content" is how you ensure everything from network neutrality to basic privacy.
Re: Sunsetting Section 230 Will Hurt Internet Users, Not Big Tech
#10Sunsetting Section 230 will hurt internet users and big tech.