And yet phone companies and postal services aren't liable for what people send using their services. The big difference of course is that digital services are much closer in effect to being a broadcast service, and the costs are much much lower than phones or snail mail.
So to say that these policies are exceptionalism is bending the truth, when in fact it is a faulty, leaky, middle ground between old world information transmission systems; private (phones), semi public (snail mail, think spam, political pamphlets), and public (mainstream media).
We live in an imperfect world and this is yet another example. The pendulum will nevertheless swing the other way for a while.
> digital services are much closer in effect to being a broadcast service
One of the points from the article is that many of these players (e.g. facebook, uber, etc) are not simple broadcast services, but select content from an available pool for users. It seems like 2010 Facebook, with its simple feed algorithm, can much more credibly claim to be an impartial carrier of content a'la the postal service.
I wonder if the influence of a platform on content selection will become legally important for regulation.
But digital services do actively censor posts, even if your post is perfectly legal. Postal services do not destroy letters with pictures of nipples in it, just try to post an image of a female breast on Facebook. If they can censor nipples, they can actively filter hate speech or abusive posts just fine. Claimining it's too difficult to monitor posts pro–actively was probably true in 2005, but not anymore. Right now, platforms like Facebook are eating cake and having it too.
Yes, well the phone company isn't listening in on what you're saying and deciding if it's "fake news" or not and disconnecting you if it is "fake news".
Facebook has no one to blame but themselves for going into the role of "internet police" and giving up their safe harbour provision. You can't have it both ways, you can't be an open platform under the protections of safe harbour and a curated feed with censorship.
>And yet phone companies and postal services aren't liable for what people send using their services.
Phone companies and postal services don't directly profit from the contents of conversations, letters, and packages. Google, Facebook, and so on, directly profit from the content, not from providing the service.
Well I tend to think they also have deeper pockets and are more concerned with public perception than phone and mail are. Some of it has to do with the fact people don't see them as indispensable so they have to not be to belligerent standing up for themselves.
The article regards this change as almost a foregone conclusion, while mentioning that "Internet activists and the firms themselves may deplore" the loss of §230.
If you're reading this and you're in one of these categories, you can do something rather than just deplore the change. For example, get your company to write or sign on to amicus briefs in §230 cases explaining why not being liable for user activity is important to you.
Also, all different kinds of organizations can endorse or advocate for
The immunity must be limited to sites that are neutral, in the same way that non-political religious organizations are tax-exempt. Why? Because to claim that a site isn't responsible for a user's content is fine, until the site starts editing, censoring or weighting certain points of view. When the site loses its neutrality it ceases to be a conduit of content and instead becomes content. Indemnification from liability for a specific point-of-view is, I feel, an abridgment of free speech and I believe it is unconstitutional.
You're essentially restating the concept of Common Carrier status[1], which is the inspiration for what Sec230 erected on the internet for content providers, so YouTube couldn't be charged with Material Support just because someone uploaded ISIS videos.
Because to claim that a site isn't responsible for a user's content is fine, until the site starts editing, censoring or weighting certain points of view.
I have a lot of sympathy for the idea that a neutral service should not automatically be responsible for the content it unknowingly transfers on behalf of a small minority of its users. This principle would support common carrier status for services like post delivery or phone networks.
But I also think we have to be careful not to go too far. The potential damage caused by an online distribution network in terms of sharing material that should not be shared is many orders of magnitude greater in terms of potential reach and rate of distribution than the analogous damage caused by a postal or phone service. We shouldn't assume that a reasonable balance between responsibility and safe harbour in one context is necessarily still a good balance in a different context.
Today's big IT businesses make staggering amounts of money from their online services. Some of those services, like YouTube, include significant amounts of illegal content, and sometimes that content was part of the main attraction that got the service established in the first place. I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that the operators of such services shouldn't get a complete pass on facilitating substantial amounts of illegal activity just because policing their services more effectively or at least providing enough resources to respond quickly when they are actively informed of a problem would be inconvenient or cost them money.
The same goes for disruptive businesses like Airbnb and Uber. I have nothing against the disruption itself, where someone is using innovative business models that take advantage of modern technology to compete with established big players. However, I do have something against innovative business models that offer a certain advantage over incumbents only because they don't follow the same rules as everyone else. If some of those rules are no longer fit for purpose then they should be changed or removed appropriately, but then they should be changed or removed for everyone, too.
> The immunity must be limited to sites that are neutral, in the same way that non-political religious organizations are tax-exempt. Why? Because to claim that a site isn't responsible for a user's content is fine, until the site starts editing, censoring or weighting certain points of view. When the site loses its neutrality it ceases to be a conduit of content and instead becomes content. Indemnification from liability for a specific point-of-view is, I feel, an abridgment of free speech and I believe it is unconstitutional.
1) Yeah that works great until someone uploads content about children being sexually abused and you can't take it down because taking it down is a non-neutral action (censorship).
2) Same, but non-consensual pornography of someone's ex.
3) Same, but advocating a clear and immediate desire to commit violence.
4) Same, but "fighting words" (a well known exemption when said to someone's face to free speech protections).
5) Same, but obscenity.
There are some very, very massive flaws of that nature with your position and I'd continue but I think you are getting the idea. Such things don't only impact the speaker and therefore create a situation where the provider should (in theory) censor them.
Similarly, such things have been ruled to be outside of the bounds of "free speech" in the US by the judicial system.
Previous periods of overbearing law enforcement in the face of rapidly changing technology imho had a lot to do with the flourishing of open source and the multiplication and widespread adoption of federated protocols. Subsequent changes in the political environment (not least the collapse of Soviet-style communism and the end of the Cold War) led to a moderately happy marriage between convenience and consumerism in which the web flourished and provided wins for both consumers and capitalists.
I feel the emerging need now is for lean protocols and tools that allow us to effectively filter unwanted content and to view and manipulate metadata structures, both inherent and emergent. If you're looking for inspiration in places other than the commercial sphere, much interesting work on digital ontologies has been emerging from the EU in recent years.
> If you're looking for inspiration in places other than the commercial sphere, much interesting work on digital ontologies has been emerging from the EU in recent years.
This sounds interesting - do you have any recommended reading / websites here you would suggest?
I was briefly concerned before dismissing this all as absurd. Surely we aren't more likely to hold tech companies responsible for the actions of their users than we are to hold gun manufacturers responsible for theirs.
> The argument that they do not interfere in the kind of content that is shown was a key rationale for exempting them from liability.
It seems like this might be the "correct" point; at least when considering "who" is responsible for content - that the degree to which you (the service provider) picks and chooses content is the degree to which you are responsible for the effects of showing that content.
In an ideal implementation, such a link also correlates with organizational size: FB of today can both afford to be liable for the content shown, and can afford the work to be responsible about it. FB when it started could not.
A better example might be Tinder - When it started, would it be reasonable for Tinder to police its users for asshole behavior? Now that Tinder is established, it is reasonable for them to not?
No, it never did, Uber just made that up. The whole basis of this article is plain false, no other words for it.
(Dito Amazon, who have brazenly been selling and even shipping electronic waste that passes no basic safety standards. No uttering of "marketplace seller" changes the legal reality.)
The pivot to Airbnb and Uber is a strange one, that's for sure.
You can draw them all in as part of a more general narrative of technology companies trying to avoid regulations and liabilities faced by their legacy competition, but the article really doesn't do enough to draw any distinction or justify the mention of these companies.
If they shred the legal immunity, the only platforms remaining will be the giants. It would be the ultimate moat for Facebook, Google, etc.
I've been waiting for two decades for the monsters in DC (and their many accomplices) to legislatively make it impossible to wake up in the morning with a normal business idea (not talking Napster here) and decide to just build it without having to go through an endless parade of legal/political/regulatory/licensing concerns. It doesn't appear to be far away now, the government monster is always hungry, always expansive, always looking to dig its claws into any bastions of free movement.
My suggestion to younger entrepreneurs out there: get it while you can. This glorious period of having so much freedom to create/build - no permission required - will probably seem like a distant fantasy in another decade. There is no scenario in which they aren't going to add more and more friction to the process, putting themselves in-between you and building things online as just another layer of control.
Why would this necessarily mean they're getting rid of all legal immunity? I think we have plenty of examples outside of the digital world where legal immunity is maintained.
The digital world currently has an excessively powerful version of this -- even when they're not neutral, they're still immune, which definitely needs to be fixed.
What is the reality that taking away the legal immunity could really happen? Wouldn't the community, non-profits and big internet companies lobby against this, call up all their congress and senators like just how we stopped SOPA and PIPA?
Cases like this are the few I'd approve of corporate lobbying for(which I'm usually against personally). I do not like the idea of censorship myself. Is someone posting hateful stuff? Unfollow or block them. I feel like censorship should be used in rare cases.
> GOOGLE, Facebook and other online giants like to see their rapid rise as the product of their founders’ brilliance. Others argue that their success is more a result of lucky timing and network effects—the economic forces that tend to make bigger firms even bigger.
(Take it easy with that down arrow button :) but yet others see their rapid rise as sponsored fronts for Intelligence.
[p.s. & I would be delighted to be presented with thoughtful replies that show /why/ the above view can not possibly be true.]
Why do people have to quote fake news like it's an invented problem? I guess there could be some disagreement on the scope of the problem, but there's inevitably a better-trained person in this world who will be researching and becoming a subject matter expert on this in the coming years on it's effects and breadth.
It essentially is an invented problem, which was immediately abused by both sides of the political spectrum, so an absolute version of it is hard to nail down.
There's little or no proof I've seen that shows any significant number of people actually believe the stuff on small sketchy sites in question originally - and then the term definition got expanded to seemingly include any slightly misinformed MSM article.
Because the term "fake news" is about two months old, and no sooner was it invented than people started abusing it well beyond its original definition.
The term was made up to describe completely and deliberately made-up news stories created for lulz or clicks, but immediately expanded to also include news that isn't deliberately falsified but might just be biased, distorted, true yet deceptively phrased, or non-deliberately inaccurate -- and from there used as a general catch-all term for criticising any news source you don't like, whether that's Breitbart or CNN.
There is very little objective news left, and very few unbiased umpires remaining to judge it. I don't think any of us should trust facebook, of all places, to set itself up as the arbiter of what is "fake" and should be censored, as the company's own political views are well known and I don't believe they are likely to be capable of applying consistent standards to both sides.
The Economist limits the number of articles you can read in a week, so it's not a total paywall. The number of articles you have read in a week is stored in a cookie, as a reader of HN I think you now know what to do :-)
Please note, however, that if you clear your cookies several times in a row, they end up identifying your machine in some other way (I think IP based? But that wouldn't work for very busy IPs, e.g. busy workplace with many employees, so maybe it's IP and amount of traffic over time?).
Disclaimer: I am a paying subscriber since 2010 and have tried the above just out of curiosity.
There is some absurdity in the safe harbor provisions that cover people outside of US legal jurisdiction and also that provide protections even when the provider has no actual business relationship with the customer or even any idea who the customer actually is.
I've felt that an argument could be made that safe harbor provisions should only apply when the service provider can provide an actual identity associated with an account and that that person is within US legal jurisdiction.
[+] [-] tankenmate|9 years ago|reply
So to say that these policies are exceptionalism is bending the truth, when in fact it is a faulty, leaky, middle ground between old world information transmission systems; private (phones), semi public (snail mail, think spam, political pamphlets), and public (mainstream media).
We live in an imperfect world and this is yet another example. The pendulum will nevertheless swing the other way for a while.
[+] [-] aeturnum|9 years ago|reply
One of the points from the article is that many of these players (e.g. facebook, uber, etc) are not simple broadcast services, but select content from an available pool for users. It seems like 2010 Facebook, with its simple feed algorithm, can much more credibly claim to be an impartial carrier of content a'la the postal service.
I wonder if the influence of a platform on content selection will become legally important for regulation.
[+] [-] yabatopia|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 234dd57d2c8dba|9 years ago|reply
Facebook has no one to blame but themselves for going into the role of "internet police" and giving up their safe harbour provision. You can't have it both ways, you can't be an open platform under the protections of safe harbour and a curated feed with censorship.
[+] [-] anigbrowl|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edblarney|9 years ago|reply
Postal service does not read your mail, phone companies (are not supposed to) listen in on your calls.
'Internet companies' deal directly with the content of the material.
Notice that 'email hosts' are not the issue here.
It's Google/FB/Twitter etc..
Not taking any position on the issue, but this is a rathe salient difference.
[+] [-] MR4D|9 years ago|reply
The price of free speech is high, and I think that some of the big firms are about to find that out.
The effect on users could turn out for the better, but I'm not holding my breath.
[+] [-] wang_li|9 years ago|reply
Phone companies and postal services don't directly profit from the contents of conversations, letters, and packages. Google, Facebook, and so on, directly profit from the content, not from providing the service.
[+] [-] Shivetya|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] schoen|9 years ago|reply
If you're reading this and you're in one of these categories, you can do something rather than just deplore the change. For example, get your company to write or sign on to amicus briefs in §230 cases explaining why not being liable for user activity is important to you.
Also, all different kinds of organizations can endorse or advocate for
https://www.manilaprinciples.org/
[+] [-] rrggrr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhizome|9 years ago|reply
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier
[+] [-] schoen|9 years ago|reply
Is your concern focused on the idea that the law shouldn't incentivize sites to interfere editorially with users' expression, or some other aspect?
[+] [-] Silhouette|9 years ago|reply
I have a lot of sympathy for the idea that a neutral service should not automatically be responsible for the content it unknowingly transfers on behalf of a small minority of its users. This principle would support common carrier status for services like post delivery or phone networks.
But I also think we have to be careful not to go too far. The potential damage caused by an online distribution network in terms of sharing material that should not be shared is many orders of magnitude greater in terms of potential reach and rate of distribution than the analogous damage caused by a postal or phone service. We shouldn't assume that a reasonable balance between responsibility and safe harbour in one context is necessarily still a good balance in a different context.
Today's big IT businesses make staggering amounts of money from their online services. Some of those services, like YouTube, include significant amounts of illegal content, and sometimes that content was part of the main attraction that got the service established in the first place. I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that the operators of such services shouldn't get a complete pass on facilitating substantial amounts of illegal activity just because policing their services more effectively or at least providing enough resources to respond quickly when they are actively informed of a problem would be inconvenient or cost them money.
The same goes for disruptive businesses like Airbnb and Uber. I have nothing against the disruption itself, where someone is using innovative business models that take advantage of modern technology to compete with established big players. However, I do have something against innovative business models that offer a certain advantage over incumbents only because they don't follow the same rules as everyone else. If some of those rules are no longer fit for purpose then they should be changed or removed appropriately, but then they should be changed or removed for everyone, too.
[+] [-] fictioncircle|9 years ago|reply
1) Yeah that works great until someone uploads content about children being sexually abused and you can't take it down because taking it down is a non-neutral action (censorship).
2) Same, but non-consensual pornography of someone's ex.
3) Same, but advocating a clear and immediate desire to commit violence.
4) Same, but "fighting words" (a well known exemption when said to someone's face to free speech protections).
5) Same, but obscenity.
There are some very, very massive flaws of that nature with your position and I'd continue but I think you are getting the idea. Such things don't only impact the speaker and therefore create a situation where the provider should (in theory) censor them.
Similarly, such things have been ruled to be outside of the bounds of "free speech" in the US by the judicial system.
[+] [-] milesrout|9 years ago|reply
Religious organisations aren't tax-exempt because they're non-political, they're tax-exempt because they operate as not-for-profit charities.
[+] [-] anigbrowl|9 years ago|reply
I feel the emerging need now is for lean protocols and tools that allow us to effectively filter unwanted content and to view and manipulate metadata structures, both inherent and emergent. If you're looking for inspiration in places other than the commercial sphere, much interesting work on digital ontologies has been emerging from the EU in recent years.
[+] [-] summerdown2|9 years ago|reply
This sounds interesting - do you have any recommended reading / websites here you would suggest?
[+] [-] chris0x00|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RangerScience|9 years ago|reply
It seems like this might be the "correct" point; at least when considering "who" is responsible for content - that the degree to which you (the service provider) picks and chooses content is the degree to which you are responsible for the effects of showing that content.
In an ideal implementation, such a link also correlates with organizational size: FB of today can both afford to be liable for the content shown, and can afford the work to be responsible about it. FB when it started could not.
A better example might be Tinder - When it started, would it be reasonable for Tinder to police its users for asshole behavior? Now that Tinder is established, it is reasonable for them to not?
[+] [-] revelation|9 years ago|reply
No, it never did, Uber just made that up. The whole basis of this article is plain false, no other words for it.
(Dito Amazon, who have brazenly been selling and even shipping electronic waste that passes no basic safety standards. No uttering of "marketplace seller" changes the legal reality.)
[+] [-] zerocrates|9 years ago|reply
You can draw them all in as part of a more general narrative of technology companies trying to avoid regulations and liabilities faced by their legacy competition, but the article really doesn't do enough to draw any distinction or justify the mention of these companies.
[+] [-] codyps|9 years ago|reply
> Although limiting liability online was intended to protect sites hosting digital content, it carried over to service platforms
[+] [-] Wilya|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adventured|9 years ago|reply
I've been waiting for two decades for the monsters in DC (and their many accomplices) to legislatively make it impossible to wake up in the morning with a normal business idea (not talking Napster here) and decide to just build it without having to go through an endless parade of legal/political/regulatory/licensing concerns. It doesn't appear to be far away now, the government monster is always hungry, always expansive, always looking to dig its claws into any bastions of free movement.
My suggestion to younger entrepreneurs out there: get it while you can. This glorious period of having so much freedom to create/build - no permission required - will probably seem like a distant fantasy in another decade. There is no scenario in which they aren't going to add more and more friction to the process, putting themselves in-between you and building things online as just another layer of control.
[+] [-] just2n|9 years ago|reply
The digital world currently has an excessively powerful version of this -- even when they're not neutral, they're still immune, which definitely needs to be fixed.
[+] [-] Keverw|9 years ago|reply
Cases like this are the few I'd approve of corporate lobbying for(which I'm usually against personally). I do not like the idea of censorship myself. Is someone posting hateful stuff? Unfollow or block them. I feel like censorship should be used in rare cases.
[+] [-] eternalban|9 years ago|reply
(Take it easy with that down arrow button :) but yet others see their rapid rise as sponsored fronts for Intelligence.
[p.s. & I would be delighted to be presented with thoughtful replies that show /why/ the above view can not possibly be true.]
[+] [-] benchaney|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] solidsnack9000|9 years ago|reply
"The one who asserts must prove."
"The burden of proof lies with the accuser."
Maybe you are starting the wrong way round.
[+] [-] jdoliner|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ebcode|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hyperion2010|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shmerl|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] known|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] awinder|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] problems|9 years ago|reply
There's little or no proof I've seen that shows any significant number of people actually believe the stuff on small sketchy sites in question originally - and then the term definition got expanded to seemingly include any slightly misinformed MSM article.
[+] [-] gydfi|9 years ago|reply
The term was made up to describe completely and deliberately made-up news stories created for lulz or clicks, but immediately expanded to also include news that isn't deliberately falsified but might just be biased, distorted, true yet deceptively phrased, or non-deliberately inaccurate -- and from there used as a general catch-all term for criticising any news source you don't like, whether that's Breitbart or CNN.
There is very little objective news left, and very few unbiased umpires remaining to judge it. I don't think any of us should trust facebook, of all places, to set itself up as the arbiter of what is "fake" and should be censored, as the company's own political views are well known and I don't believe they are likely to be capable of applying consistent standards to both sides.
[+] [-] jackmott|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] SteveWatson|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mastazi|9 years ago|reply
Please note, however, that if you clear your cookies several times in a row, they end up identifying your machine in some other way (I think IP based? But that wouldn't work for very busy IPs, e.g. busy workplace with many employees, so maybe it's IP and amount of traffic over time?).
Disclaimer: I am a paying subscriber since 2010 and have tried the above just out of curiosity.
[+] [-] dang|9 years ago|reply
Re paywalls, HN's rule is that they're ok as long as there's a standard workaround. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989.
[+] [-] btian|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simcop2387|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] problems|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] milesrout|9 years ago|reply
You sure as hell should be liable when your buggy crappy software costs people money.
[+] [-] wang_li|9 years ago|reply
I've felt that an argument could be made that safe harbor provisions should only apply when the service provider can provide an actual identity associated with an account and that that person is within US legal jurisdiction.