Smallwood St Park MD "canyon" |
Timothy B. Lee (writes for Arstechnica) just pointed
out an interesting post by Steven Randy Waldman on his Interfluidity blog,
“Repealing Section 230 as antitrust”.
Waldman makes the case that hosting companies for
regular sites is very different from running a social media “platform”. Indeed,
he says, if you repealed 230, web hosts could still leave ordinary site owners
alone as long as owner-users were identifiable (which breaks EFF’s idea of the right
to anonymity) and hosts were absolutely neutral (regard them as “common
carriers”). He considers Blogger and
Wordpress as “edge cases”, although Wordpress is typically installed on hosted
sites.
There is still one difference between web hosting (or
blog hosting) and a telephone carrier as in the past: a website's content is, in theory, accessible anywhere
in the world (maybe not China?) it is not blocked and normally searched.
That implies that people presume a right to globalized
speech on their social and political views without supervision of others. That is not necessarily constitutionally
guaranteed (this point was argued with COPA in 2007), and many observers think it
isn’t such a good thing not to have to please and work with others before you
are heard. The far Left, for example,
wants to recruit more protesters and fundraisers, not more citizen journalists
who don’t believe in intersectionality and hiding behind group oppression.
There is also a lot of underground thought that people
should have their own global web presence only if they are serious about
selling things, that is, have legitimate commerce (that pays rent and can even
hire employees) to offer. Now, I have an
unusual history into how I got into “social commentary” (it started in the
1990s with gays in the military and my own history, and expanded
circumferentially). I don’t have anything to sell (or pester people with emails
or deals or beg for donations – but that’s how you play the game). Maybe my music will work some day. (And I do have a novel, and a screenplay,
based on the books – which are old and not really viable to sell as a “real business”
any longer).
Lee has an earlier article, June 10, 2020, in Arstechnica
as a full explainer of Section 230. “The Internet’s most important – and misunderstood
– law, explained.
Note the ACM’s forum on Section 230 from Nov. 23,
2020. I'll take a look at this one.
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