Section 230 created the internet as we know it. Don’t mess with it
latimes.com
latimes.com
Thinking of the future is just depressing.
However, the primary reason publishing now requires an imprimatur[1], usually from a large increasingly cable-TV-like corporation, is NAT. The internet where any peer could publish no longer exists. NAT turned it into as collection of party lines. Since real network software isn't possible[2] over party lines, software development has been limited to centralized client-server designs.
As for Section 230, an improvement that would help steer the internet away from cable TV is to remove the power to control access without liability is simple: s/provider/common carrier/. If you don't want liability, you nee to be a neutral carrier that only moves data as a back box. Inspection and curation brings liability for the content of what you publish.
[1] https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/
[2] It is sometimes possible, but nobody tries because NAT traversal[3] is hard.
Section 230 actually was adopted because without it hosts minimized liability by not moderating; moderation is what opened them up to liability as a publisher rather than being treated as a distributor, 230 gave a fairly ironclad (originally) guarantee that they would not be liable if they moderated content so long as they weren't actively leveraging the illegal content.
Unless (gasp) we don't use the walled gardens?
Extremely portable packet radio is on the horizon.
The big walled gardens will have bulk licenses, the small fry and start ups will die because they can't afford those licenses.
That's probably not a problem since you'd provide him with a comprehensive database containing all copyrighted material ( audio, text, visual, computer code) and an algorithm that detects legal equivalents of these materials in your forum in real time.
Obviously this is all speculation and depends on the wording of the law.
- blogs can have several authors and shared responsibility
- small sites have comment sections
- forums and small contributive community websites are a very important part of the participative internet
- small startups may very well create user content oriented innovative services
And none of the above have the power to lawyer up enough, while GAFAM are experts at it.
The closest analogy would be digital speakeasies; not for inebriating beverages, but rather just the ability to communicate.
EDIT: Not sure why I'm being downvoted. This will kill any innovation by small businesses on the internet. Nobody will take the risks. New platforms akin to Snapchat or whatever will be looked at as riskier endeavors before they're even able to get off the ground.
Now with all the fearmongering from the Radical Left about the evils of the internet and big internet companies, and the apathy of voters as their elected representatives move to centralize control, we're in the process of repealing the legal protections that made the modern internet, with all of its chaos, innovation and empowerment, possible.
Section 230's main feature is to let sites dodge the responsibility that comes with the right to act as the modern public square in the US (and most other countries), where "public square" means that any conversation can be had there between members of the public provided that conversation isn't outright illegal (or so loud that no other conversation can take place).
Instead, Section 230 allows website operators to follow whatever moral code they see fit in terms of moderation. This gives disproportionate political power to particular American subcultures, and these people trend toward the Progressive end, injecting the public discourse with a Progressive bias rather than reflecting the country as a whole because they consider it their moral duty to stamp out content that is hateful, objectionable, or simply contradictory/insulting a Progressive cause (whether these judgments are correct or not is an entirely different matter).
They're clearly doing the best they can under their constraints and circumstances, and their value judgments are popular worldwide.
Were Section 230 to be eliminated the problems that Sen. Wyden mentions only get worse, because you either allow everything permissible under 1A or go out of business due to liability issues (remember, the First Amendment and Supreme Court precedent do not allow other restrictions) without any popular moral code to clean it up. Advertisers won't realistically be able to pull funding because it affects the vast majority of the Internet equally (outside of dumping millions of dollars into small walled-garden services), and Articles 11 and 13 (not to mention the absolute lack of law even resembling the First Amendment) in the EU have done an excellent job ensuring that US tech companies would still face even greater difficulties in Europe.
There's an asterisk for SESTA-FOSTA here (where even unmoderated public squares might still face legal liability), but that law has yet to be seriously evaluated against the First Amendment, a challenge it will certainly fail (a reminder that Section 230 is the only surviving part of the Communications Decency Act because the rest contravened the 1A).
It definitely means the end of the internet as we know it today; particularly, because of the collision of various lines of liability precedent (which motivated 230) it probably means the end of any American commercial entity hosting content from third parties free of charge, because even unmoderated unreviewed content will carry far higher risk of liability than today and moderated venues that don't feature deep and comprehensive review—and payment to cover the cost (and probably also indemnity clauses)—won't be viable at all: so instead of moderated public fora or unmoderated public fora you will have no public forum at all.
If it as OP says, the opposite would be true. Either moderate and risk liability. Or allow anything and get indemnity.
OP is wrong because there is also significant distributor liability (which applies even without he kind of active review that creates publisher liability), notably—at least, this is the specific subject matter that got the issue with regard to 230 to the Supreme Court—for defamatory content, and while 230 expressly only protects against publisher liability, the Supreme Court has found that, where it otherwise applies, it is also a bar for distributor liability for content.
Even if this only applied to defamatory content, the risk of defamation lawsuits would eliminate unmoderated public fora without 230.
1) refused to do anything at all to to remove the images of these children being raped
2) refused to do anything to prevent the ads being placed
3) gave advice to the advertisers about how to continue placing the ads while evading law enforcement
4) claimed to be coopoerating with law enforcement while actively making it harder for law enforcement to trace the people placing these ads