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 Fact).

For example it talks about routing:

> “The Internet uses ‘packet switching’ communication protocols that allow individual messages to be subdivided into smaller ‘packets’ that are then sent independently to the destination, and are then automatically reassembled by the receiving computer. While all packets of a given message often travel along the same path to the destination, if computers along the route become overloaded, the packets can be re-routed to less loaded computers.”

And that was back in the 1990s. What people seem to really mean when they say “the Supreme Court doesn’t understand X” is that the Supreme Court doesn’t share the values they associate with X. That’s almost certainly the case. From the Supreme Court’s view, the internet is just another part of the national economy. They don’t understand or care about the distinct cultural values of people in that sector.