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Comment by tboyd47 | Hacker News Reader

EFF is supported by Big Tech and Section 230 definitely does protect Big Tech and makes their entire business model possible.

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I'm not saying you're wrong about the EFF's support, but I'm not finding a lot of information that says you're right, either. I tend to think of the EFF as generally (not always) being on the right side of issues in their domain, but if that's not true, or if their donor list makes it seem less likely that it's true, I would be interested to know more.

For reference, I found the following descriptions of EFF's major donors, and I looked at their most recent IRS filing. Nothing jumped out at me, but maybe I don't know where to look.

https://www.eff.org/pages/thank-you-public-foundations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Frontier_Foundation... https://donations.vipulnaik.com/donee.php?donee=Electronic+F...

I respect the EFF but their Section 230 stance is a huge blind spot. At least they know not to bite the hand that feeds them, like the ACLU and the 2A.

What do you think their blind spot is here? Do you have a preferred approach to intermediary liability?

(former EFFer)

Building tools to disintermediate online publishing, rather than building legal moats for intermediaries, would be nice.

No one's stopping you.

The existence of 230 propping up and effectively subsidizing centralized systems actually is in a non trivial manner. A centralized system with a single giant point of failure is always going to be cheaper and/or easier for users, so as long as we provide ways to bail out or otherwise provide immunity to centralized platforms of all forms we actively erode the ability to ever have decentralized systems. You don't need 230 to build any of these things... maybe you did in the 90s, but technology has long since advanced, and we would be better off phasing out this crutch.

I'm hearing a lot of excuses and a pointed lack of actual decentralized/disintermediated systems.

But isn't that what we'd expect? It is kind of ridiculous to insist that a decentralized system out-compete a centralized one on axes such as expense or complexity or performance. The reality is that we do now have a ton of decentralized systems: most people -- certainly you, clearly -- just don't use them, as they are at least slightly worse than the centralized versions in ways you care about.

Is that an "excuse"? I mean, what even is an excuse? I think it is simply reality. Only, I still think we should all not want centralized systems capable of controlling the flow of information, money, etc. The decentralized systems we have at this point aren't bad... they just aren't as good as current centralized ones. Hell: they even compare favorably to the 90s-era centralized systems!

As it stands, rather than trying to increasingly regulate these centralized systems in the hope they eventually go away, we've been instead subsidizing (or even "bailing out" in some cases) their awkward control, giving them power beyond what anyone previously could have imagined, enabling their crazy scale, because... it's efficient and easy? That's super lame :(.

> The reality is that we do now have a ton of decentralized systems: most people -- certainly you, clearly -- just don't use them, as they are at least slightly worse than the centralized versions in ways you care about.

It would be great if you would not snidely assume you know anything about me in future posts, thanks! I am reasonably familiar with attempts at decentralizing webhosting, at least (off the top of my head: i2p, FreeNet, and (arguably) Tor hidden services are major examples that come to mind) and to describe any of them as "slightly worse" than the mainstream web is laughable. I'm certainly willing to hear you out if you have better examples, though; I can't help but note that as indignant as you are you still aren't providing any examples of these wonderful decentralized systems I'm so ignorant of.

Do you have a point here besides dunking on the current sorry state of things? We all agree that existing systems have significant flaws. The swiping and reflexive downvoting in this thread is disappointing.

I rather think that the internet mostly sucks right now, and would be way better without Facebook, Twitter, Google, Insta, etc. With the exception of TikTok, which actually has a decent search function, all those companies are blatantly censoring and deleting real content left and right. So much that I have come to think that's actually their whole purpose. I rarely even use those services as it stands, with the exception of YouTube, which I just rip audio from and download to listen in the car. Guess what, it's not rocket science to host an audio file. With AI, even Google is mostly useless, returning only a few dozen results, if that. There really isn't even an internet anymore except for places like HN. Kill Big Tech dead and let people find each other again.

You could just as easily turn that back on the pro-230 crowd. Can't innovate without Section 230? Excuses.

In fact, it's easier to make the case against Section 230 because an internet actually did exist before Section 230 and was fairly decentralized.

The common sense approach to intermediary liability is what was already in place before the CDA turned everything upside-down. If you're an intermediary, there's a trade-off to be made. Either exercise creative license in your mediation of user communications, and be legally liable for that, or don't, and stay free of liability. I think that makes a lot of sense, and would have been totally fine on the internet, and was totally fine until 1996. It allows for all the same business models that were growing and thriving until 1996. It didn't impede the economies of scale that were unfolding and continued to unfold. Then, in 1996, the internet began the process of de-linking, de-indexing, de-listing, shadow-banning, click-baiting, and pay-walling. And "communications decency" was definitely not achieved, either.

> It allows for all the same business models that were growing and thriving until 1996.

No, it doesn't, because those models were—as money was getting into them and both criminal proesecutors and potential civil litigants gained awareness of them—being squeezed between threats of criminal prosecution for relaying things where the existing criminal law does not provide the outs for hands-off distribution that civil publisher vs. distributor liability does (creating pressure for moderation) and civil liability for the kinds of things where publisher vs. distributor liability did apply before 230 (creating pressure either to be completely hands off or to only accept UGC of resources existed for comprehensive, total moderation.)

The space of commercially viable UGC without Section 230 looks like hardcopy newspapers letters to the editor sections, both in style and in volume relative to first-party content.

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