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Comment by AlbertCory | Hacker News Reader

I'm receptive to a nuanced, intelligent take on the issue, but this isn't it. It's a one-sided partisan screed.

> Instead, we want to focus on what we see as a glaring omission in the co-sponsor’s argument: how central Section 230 is to ensuring that every person can speak online.

Again, this is a disingenuous argument in that it ignores the issue of the monopoly power of the biggest Big Tech.

The distinction between "publisher" and "common carrier" has to be sharpened, and maybe (hear me out here) if a company is big enough that its acquisitions have to be scrutinized by the FTC for market-controlling power, then it's also tending to deserve "common carrier" treatment. Just a thought.

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The idea that there's an indistinct difference between "publisher" and "common carrier" doesn't seem right. Google or Facebook are not, and have never been, common carriers. The entities that most resemble "common carriers", as that term is historically used, are infrastructure-layer companies. I don't see how the distinction could be sharper.

> The idea that there's an indistinct difference between "publisher" and "common carrier"

perhaps "redefine" would have been a better word than "sharpen."

There certainly IS a distinct difference. The discussion point was "monopoly power makes you more likely to resemble a common carrier."

Monopoly concerns are better addressed by going after monopolies for being anticompetitive. Intermediary liability seems pretty orthogonal to competition concerns. I would need a lot of convincing to start believing that categories like search or even social media (despite network effects) are natural monopolies akin to railroads or POTS-type phone companies of yore – where you can't have efficient competition, and don't have thorny 1A issues to deal with, so common-carrier approaches are defensible.

As an aside, one reason I think 230 pretty much correct is that authoritarians on both sides of the spectrum want to axe it, but for different reasons.

OK, but you ignored the "mergers and acquisitions" point: if they're big enough to have acquisitions scrutinized closely (but not big enough for antitrust actions, as your points address), then maybe they should lose some 230 protections.

i.e. it's not a binary.

Why though? Seems to me that while any website of any size that allows any kind of user generated content (without every post being pre-approved before it goes live) needs protections like what Section 230 is meant to provide, the more users posting, the harder your problems are and the more important those protections are…

I mean, you can make the argument “I don’t like big tech so I want to make it impossible for them to legally function while allowing any user-generated content” but I’m not sure most would agree.

I think we're done.

That's different issue. Getting rid of Kill Section 230 not sharpen distinction between between "publisher" and "common carrier", it removes it.

Lets stay with "Kill Section 230" and it's consequences.

It's not a different issue at all; it's the same issue.

Kill 230 and Big Tech (or any tech) has to choose one or the other, that being the distinction before the Internet.

>has to choose one or the other,

There is no choice. Common carrier thing you suggest does not appear if Section 230 is removed. Big Tech would become publisher. They would permaban everything even slightly unconformable and be fine.

Small forums would disappear. You can't run small forum if you can be sued.

You're not thinking more than one move ahead.

Big Tech being a publisher means that their user-generated content would drop to the level of "Letters to the Editor" in the NY Times. Thus their revenue would dry up, too, because all those teen-agers walking around staring at their phones are doing so because they or their friends or someone they admire has content on there. They're not looking at passive media.

Now tell me about small sites.

Or sites like Wikipedia, running mastodon instance, blogging, ..

Those who have money to sue, like Saudi Arabian government, Israel, or billionaires and lobby groups would have a field day.

Now tell me about small paper magazines, which ARE publishers and have existed for 100's of years.

Small paper magazines consisting mostly or entirely of user-generated, unedited content?

> user-generated

They had writers. Usually those were not employees. They had to lawyer-ize everything they printed. If you sent in a Letter to the Editor, they had to scrutinize that, too, and call you to be sure you really wrote it.

If you're saying it's so important that people with no skill whatsoever be able to say whatever they want with no liability to the company that prints it; furthermore, that that company be able to monetize their content: I guess we're disagreeing. I don't think the world would be any worse off if that were no longer the case. In fact, we'd probably be better off.

> They would permaban everything even slightly unconformable and be fine.

There is no way that scales IMO.

Is that supposed to be the killer argument? Who cares if giant companies can't "scale" any more?

I mean there is no way they can whack-a-mole every problematic user post. Even if they could- users wouldn't stand for it and would look for alternatives. If they started losing users to this they'd also work on a solution or new laws.

I don't think a post-section 230 web is pessimistic but that's my opinion. We shall see I suppose.

I say, "bring it on." The current web is an open sewer and something would evolve that would probably be better. It could hardly be any worse.

If that turns out not to be the case, we could always reinstate 230.

Yes, I agree.

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