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Comment by timdev2 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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