Sunsetting Section 230 Will Hurt Internet Users, Not Big Tech | Hacker News Reader

Sunsetting Section 230 Will Hurt Internet Users, Not Big Tech

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44 pointspcvarmint17 comments

If 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.

"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.

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/

Correction:

s/but it protects/but its sunsetting would protect/

Section 230 prevents small hosts from going to jail because somebody illicitly used their site for pirate uploads or illegal speech. Don't be naive. No section 230 means no 'small internet', because anybody can get you criminally charged.

The removal of comparative protections in the UK is why British web communities collapsed, from small forums to huge communities like Liveleak. We shouldn't pretend this is good.

This is nonsensical. First off, if someone illicitly uses your site for something Section 230 isn't what is protecting you from that: if I hack into your computers and inject a bunch of content onto it, you aren't somehow more liable than if I went to your building in the middle of the night and graffitied something illegal all over it just because it uses a computer: you were also a victim.

As for "small web forums", that's still centralized, and still bad (and frankly is often worse, as the smaller players tend to have poorer data control policies)! I don't want anyone, anywhere, at any scale controlling centralized forums :/.

If you want to build an online gathering place, maybe it is in fact a very very good thing if it has to be built using decentralized end-to-end encryption with customizable endpoint filtering, and the "web forum" becomes a relic of the past.

It should be hard to build a centralized web service. There should be any number of scary liabilities that come with doing such, and that is frankly the only way we are ever going to get to a decentralized future, as, otherwise, yes: as it stands, we are essentially subsidizing the existence of centralized services.

And maybe we needed to do this in the 90s and 00s, but we now live in a world with a lot better understanding of encryption and a lot better understanding of peer-to-peer services and if we just stopped tolerating centralized services enough to force everyone to deal with the always-will-be-a-bit-worse experience of decentralized ones, we can escape this ad-infused dystopia (and remember: even the small players use ads, and their ads are again often worse).

Section 230 obviously has multiple effects. It is not simply one or the other.

It can benefit small sites that produce their own content and large ones that don't at the same time.

But if, effectvely, the only way web users find or discover a small site is through a large one that acts as an intermediary (middleman) then perhaps the fact of the intermediary poses a greater, more practical threat of "censorship" than a lack of Section 230 immunity.

Because Section 230 has allowed the growth of "Big Tech", the argument around small sites with controversial content "staying online" is no longer only an issue of having Section 230 protection, it is an issue of whether certain gigantic, third party intermediaries will allow these small sites to be found/discovered and to continue to receive "service". Operating a personal website is rare. Publishing on the web today is mostly sharecropping in a feudal system. It's publishing pages on someone else's website.

Section 230 allowed the www to go from a public resource to a private one, controlled by a handful of mega-sized websites, now with so much cash and control over the web's direction that no one thinks of them as merely websites anymore. We are now stuck with a web of intermediaries, middelmen formed for commercial purpose of surveilling web users and targeted them with ads. The big ones are so big that people believe they do not need Section 230 protection. But they could never have grown so big without Section 230.

Section 230 has positive effects and it has negative ones. It's good and it's bad. There are Section 230's well-intentioned, theoretical incentives and then there are actual, historical events that it has enabled. What actually happened.

No one can predict the future. But Section 230 is an experiment that has run its course. We know what happened and we know the role that Section 230 played in it.

What 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?

> What constitutes "publishing" under the CDA is somewhat narrowly defined by the courts. The Ninth Circuit held that "Publication involves reviewing, editing, and deciding whether to publish or to withdraw from publication third-party content."

Under current interpretation, this law thereby does not apply to at least Tor. It could maybe apply to Bitcoin, but I would think it does not apply to Zcash. I do not know how to analyze the Torrent DHT, but I am very confident that it could be fixed so this isn't an issue (and everyone would benefit from that being fixed even today).

Yes, please, any clarification you can provide is appreciated!

It is dismaying that so many people who should know better have fallen deep for the anti-Section 230 propaganda after years of bullshit peddling. Meanwhile the whole time I thought "Who would be stupid enough to fall for it?".

Sunsetting Section 230 will hurt internet users and big tech.

I 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.

SESTA and FOSTA go far beyond the lack of Section 230 by criminalizing even some scenarios where the operator is not using any editorial discretion, might not even have any access to the content in question, and isn't really "publishing" anything at all. The cases where these laws might apply are not ones where we might try to have argued that the website directly was the speaker: they focus on the idea of enabling a use case; and so, while there is some overlap in their application, it isn't fair to describe the pain of these laws as coming from how they affect Section 230 protections.

Section 230 was a response to a lawsuit that happened in 1995. It was passed in 1996. You're talking about a legal state that hardly existed for a year, but dismiss things as fine 'before'. Seems a bit of a crude dismissal.

> 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.

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