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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Then separate the businesses of the online platforms (user generated facebook/twitter pages), and the online publishers (algorithmically generated news feed of said pages) and have libel laws for the latter.
That would destroy the ability to run any sort of forum that isn’t essentially 4chan. Actually, even 4chan has moderation beyond what’s legally required, to define the topic of each of its subforums.
It isn’t possible for any volunteer-based forum to survive the sort of liability this would add, so they’d have to shut down.
The 90s internet didn't have billions of consumers and millions of producers with millions of followers. That internet is _never_ coming back, the sooner we swallow that bitter pill, the better we move forward, instead of trying to replicate an impossibility.
If you think 4chan is a place where people treat people a lot more like they treat each other in real life, I'd really hate to see what your life is like.
> It would put us back in the early 2000s internet, in that relatively relaxed environment, that many grew up with and loved, where we didn't have to constantly walk on eggshells and be paranoid about who's going to try to get who de-platformed for what they said.
I have never once been worried about being de-platformed for what I say.
We're never going back to the "early days" of the internet, and the main difference between then and now is not the level of moderation of user generated content. You have to say some pretty unpopular and unpleasant stuff to a large audience to even seriously be in the running for being de-platformed. If you want to say things that are largely unpopular, you probably need to have those conversations on smaller platforms, just like how people behave in person. The technology available in 2000 (like IRC) is still available today; you just can't rely on the servers of the largest companies in the world to host it for you.
Section 230 protects big tech by removing liability from what they publish, giving a competitive advantage to big tech over local newspaper and other media.
Because local newspapers are responsible for what they publish, they don’t get the viewership that unfiltered social media can get. This is why local news does, because of section 230.
Local newspaper died at the hands of national newspapers because what's happening in your town is just not as interesting as what's happening across the whole country. Similarly, national newspapers died at the hands of the internet because they're just not as interesting as the whole globe. Because of this limit, they're not as profitable at selling and targeting ads.
230 also doesn't provide an endless liability protection over "traditional" media, but it is generally more forgiving. Personally, I don't know why we'd expect tweets to have the same relationship to twitter that a news story has to a newspaper. One is written by a user vs an employee.
Newspapers didn’t rely on 230 much at all with centuries of precedent protecting them. What killed then was losing the ad revenue they used to get from local businesses, property sales, dating, etc. Even modest sized towns could afford good local coverage before that money was siphoned off to San Francisco.
Section 230 is critical for tech businesses and platforms that facilitate free distribution of speech. Without this, we can be confident that "user generated content" would look very different, and moderation efforts would be much more censorious. As the EFF said in the article...
> The law is not a shield for Big Tech. Critically, the law benefits the millions of users who don’t have the resources to build and host their own blogs, email services, or social media sites, and instead rely on services to host that speech.
Even if you support a re-write of 230, you should oppose the proposed law to remove it because the timing of the proposed law. The proposal would expire 230 during an election cycle, and that would be horrific for online discourse about the election. The liability of hosting political discourse, and the potential to be sued for libel would make user content about politics toxic. It's undoubtable that at least one side of the political spectrum would use it to remove opposition and opposing opinions. The current administration has proven they're absolutely willing to take punitive measures against companies and people based on their speech, even when legally protected, and large companies have shown a willingness to comply, even preemptively, to avoid a fight that can disrupt their revenue.
> It's undoubtable that one side of the political spectrum would use it to remove opposition and opposing opinions.
Ideologues at several big tech firms have already used Section 230 as their liability shield for some very biased moderation of content in 2016 and 2020, including removing lots of content from their opposition.
The removal of 230 would basically require aggressive censorship of content via moderation, not enable "Free speech". If you're unhappy with the level of moderation you've witnessed, removing 230 would not prevent "Ideologues" across the political spectrum from "very biased moderation". It would guarantee the most litigious or powerful ideologues wins.
Oh, I agree with you. Removing 230 would practically mean either turning your forum into 4chan or becoming a newspaper. Section 230 just enables the exact behavior that OP was complaining about.
Worse. It would mean any forum owner could get *felony* charges for things.
Imagine a world where Pastebin, Meetup.com, or “you” and your tiny phpbb got drug trafficking facilitation charges because people used it to trade drugs and you didn’t know.
Some absolutely deranged comments accusing the EFF of being in the pockets of big tech. There are hundreds of threads on EFF topics on HN, and pretty widely I think the EFF sees enormous support. And I have never seen such bald bold baseless negative accusations hurled about before! Some absolutely wild shit jumping out to try to slander the EFF this time, totally out of the blue!
They must really be touching a nerve. Some absolute slime-tastic behavior. Again, never backed up, never substantiated, just broad accusation with no evidence, totally out of the blue.
The EFF has said all sorts of anti big tech things. They've had some real energy & excitement for FTC anti Big Tech monopoly action. They'd had data portability / adversarial interoperability arguments. They've argued again and again and again, unflinchingly, for the user.
I absolutely cannot believe some of the replies & accusation I'm reading. There are thousands and thousands of comments on EFF matters, and we are seeing waves of absolute deranged insanity the likes of which we have never seen s before. Utterly unmoored positions, with no arguments, no support, just blandly writing off some of the best pro-digital-citizen pro rfc8890 people on the planet as being secretly not what they've seemed for decades. Shame on you, you who would unleash bedlam and madness against this planet!
Section 230 is absolutely required for user content to be hosted online. The Wolf of Wall Street, Starton Oakmont, sued Prodigy because they didn't like something that was posted. Prodigy lost, causing or vastly accelerating their downfall. Savvy senator & one of the only people in Congress who understands technology Ron Wyden got 230 added to the DMCA, a fallen awful terrible piece of legislation that's been chipped away at, rolled back, as the one amazing incredibly positive shift, that's on par with Al Gore's work to allow priviitzed use of the internet in allowing online space to become a thing. We would have so little without 230. Shame shame shame on the fools, morons, and know nothing's who would post comments saying it should be withdrawal or repealed; none of us would have a forum to talk about such a thing online, none of us would be commenting at all, without 230. You monsters.
> Section 230 protects individual bloggers, anyone who forwards an email, and social media users who have ever reshared or retweeted another person’s content online.
If someone you have never heard of writes a letter -- on paper, with a pen, communicating some kind of message that is somehow restricted by law... whether it be libel, copyright infringement, offensive, or hate speech -- and I decide I like it so much that I want to send a copy of that letter in the mail to everyone in my town... I am sorry, is the intuition that the EFF is claiming here that I shouldn't be held liable, just because I in some way curated the message from someone else?
I mean, this person didn't even ask me to mail it... it isn't like I am running a newsletter for the town, having to filter out the best messages from the numerous I am sent, lest I run out of paper and my readers run out of time. No: the person who sent me that letter wanted some audience of theirs to read it, I was one of the people they sent it to, for all I know I was the only person they expected would ever read it, and now I am the reason a thousand people will.
In this scenario -- as with the examples from the EFF -- I plucked this message out of world and chose to send it to my audience... this isn't me merely deciding not to moderate it: this is more like a museum going out and hunting for pieces of art for an exhibit... is the exhibit itself somehow not an act of speech?
I dunno... I personally feel like, if anything, I should be held more liable than the person who wrote the original letter in this scenario, not less: I am the person who chose to give their message some immense audience, not them. If I try to now claim "I didn't say it... this other person did!", that's not only disingenuous, that borders on nonsensical, as if I want to say something false and bad about you, I bet I can find someone else who said something similar, and I shouldn't just to get to avoid accountability because I merely "forwarded it".
I think what the EFF is doing here is trying to claim that a law that has successfully defended a user is thereby a law that helps users; and... I do see the logic there? But--and I guess this is where the EFF and I really disagree--I'm going to say that, just because a law helps some user avoid accountability, that doesn't mean I want that user to avoid accountability! The law should make sense, not merely be a useful and powerful card to play during legal battles.
There is something else going on here, though, as I clicked on the links in this quoted section to see if I would agree with the scenarios being defended, and I feel like this phrasing was dubious and even downright misleading :/.
Take the "anyone who forwards an email" one that I am kind of poking at here... and that's not at all a good description of what happened, as the EFF website notes that the key issue at hand is whether the message has been intended to be forwarded: if not, Section 230 wouldn't apply... but like, that's the situation with most end-user email forwards, as end users aren't expected to run forwarding service!
More to the point, this was about a non-profit that runs a mailing list, a newsletter, and a mailing list, not a user. Sure: the court kind of leaned into the word "user" to make a newsletter and mailing list be an idea that could be managed under this law, but that technical definition of "user" clearly isn't what the EFF is trying to make us think of here.
But like, returning to the result: in this case, they actually did forward an email they received which clearly was not intended to be forwarded: if you read the email, that much is obvious. The actual user here, Smith, is the person I'd think we want to protect, not the non-profit that took their self-admittedly "crank" question and forwarded it to their serious mailing list and put it on their serious website as part of their ...
"Don't be fooled - many of Section 230's detractors claim that this criticla law only protects big tech."
What about the detractors who claim it protects _all_ websites, regardless of size.
"The law is not a shield for Big Tech."
It is commonly understood that Section 230 is what allowed "Big Tech" to get so big. In fact, Big Tech's lawyers have argued this in front of the Supreme Court.
"Critically, the law benefits the millions of users who don't have the resources to build and host their own blogs, email services, or social media sites, and instead rely on services to host that speech."
"Section 230 protects individual bloggers, anyone who forwards an email, and social media users who have ever reshared or retweeted another person's content online."
According to EFF 230 protects people who don't have resources to host and it protects people who do have resources to host, e.g., individual bloggers, etc.
Then EFF tries to suggest 230 "is not a shield" for Big Tech. That 230 does not protect Big Tech.
No one hosts more than Big Tech and no one has Big Tech's resources. 230 protects Big Tech as much as anyone else. As a constant target of litigation that is dismissed on 230 grounds, arguably it protects Big Tech much more than anyoone else.
However the question is not who is or is not proetced by 230. The question is what effect 230 has on the internet.
230 is what allowed Big Tech to grow so large.
Every internet subscriber paying fees has the resources to host: a computer and an internet connection.
The assumption EFF makes is that the internet must be used for advertising (because reasons), and consequently it must be used to publish to large audiences suitable for advertising. That is what Big Tech does. Nothing requires the internet be used for such purposes. Big Tech requires it for their survival.
Big Tech solicits and exploits "user-generated content" for surveillance and advertising purposes.
230 also allows small websites publishing controversial information to survive, if they are targeted with litigation.
Who gets targeted more: (a) the small website hosting one person's content or (b) the mega-sized Big Tech website hosting the content of millions of people.
230 protects _all_ websites.
"As EFF has explained, online speech is frequently targeted with meritless lawsuits. Big Tech can afford to fight these lawsuits without Section 230."
230 does not discriminate between cases that have merit and those without merit. It prevents them all.
Big Tech does not want unfavourable decisions by courts relating to their operations. Decisions that might favor internet users. Big Tech can afford to fight but history shows it settles. It avoids trials that it could easily afford. Section 230 results in countless cases being dismissed that might lead to decisions, or at least settlements, favorable to internet users.
"Engine has estimated that without Section 230, many startups and small services would be inundated with costly litigation that could drive them offline. "
EFF reminds me of Mozilla. EFF wants to protect startups. It is like Mozilla wanting to protect the "advertising ecosystem"and claiming they are protecting privacy. Advertising services fund the invasion of privacy for the purpose of selling more advertising services.
These so-called "startups" that EFF is concerned about usually envy, emulate and often want to be acquired by Big Tech. EFF cannot claim to be on the side of "everyday internet users" and then proceed to campaign for the interests of "startups" that exist to exploit those internet users, conducting wanton under-the-radar surveillance to support noxious online advertising services. Big Tech once called themselves "startups". 230 enabled them to grow and become "Big Tech".
Perhaps the most concerning omission in this blog post is the failure of...
38 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] thread(former EFFer)
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 :(.
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.
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.
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.
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...
It isn’t possible for any volunteer-based forum to survive the sort of liability this would add, so they’d have to shut down.
Are you sure that’s what you want?
I have never once been worried about being de-platformed for what I say.
We're never going back to the "early days" of the internet, and the main difference between then and now is not the level of moderation of user generated content. You have to say some pretty unpopular and unpleasant stuff to a large audience to even seriously be in the running for being de-platformed. If you want to say things that are largely unpopular, you probably need to have those conversations on smaller platforms, just like how people behave in person. The technology available in 2000 (like IRC) is still available today; you just can't rely on the servers of the largest companies in the world to host it for you.
Because local newspapers are responsible for what they publish, they don’t get the viewership that unfiltered social media can get. This is why local news does, because of section 230.
230 also doesn't provide an endless liability protection over "traditional" media, but it is generally more forgiving. Personally, I don't know why we'd expect tweets to have the same relationship to twitter that a news story has to a newspaper. One is written by a user vs an employee.
> The law is not a shield for Big Tech. Critically, the law benefits the millions of users who don’t have the resources to build and host their own blogs, email services, or social media sites, and instead rely on services to host that speech.
Even if you support a re-write of 230, you should oppose the proposed law to remove it because the timing of the proposed law. The proposal would expire 230 during an election cycle, and that would be horrific for online discourse about the election. The liability of hosting political discourse, and the potential to be sued for libel would make user content about politics toxic. It's undoubtable that at least one side of the political spectrum would use it to remove opposition and opposing opinions. The current administration has proven they're absolutely willing to take punitive measures against companies and people based on their speech, even when legally protected, and large companies have shown a willingness to comply, even preemptively, to avoid a fight that can disrupt their revenue.
Ideologues at several big tech firms have already used Section 230 as their liability shield for some very biased moderation of content in 2016 and 2020, including removing lots of content from their opposition.
Imagine a world where Pastebin, Meetup.com, or “you” and your tiny phpbb got drug trafficking facilitation charges because people used it to trade drugs and you didn’t know.
They must really be touching a nerve. Some absolute slime-tastic behavior. Again, never backed up, never substantiated, just broad accusation with no evidence, totally out of the blue.
The EFF has said all sorts of anti big tech things. They've had some real energy & excitement for FTC anti Big Tech monopoly action. They'd had data portability / adversarial interoperability arguments. They've argued again and again and again, unflinchingly, for the user.
I absolutely cannot believe some of the replies & accusation I'm reading. There are thousands and thousands of comments on EFF matters, and we are seeing waves of absolute deranged insanity the likes of which we have never seen s before. Utterly unmoored positions, with no arguments, no support, just blandly writing off some of the best pro-digital-citizen pro rfc8890 people on the planet as being secretly not what they've seemed for decades. Shame on you, you who would unleash bedlam and madness against this planet!
Section 230 is absolutely required for user content to be hosted online. The Wolf of Wall Street, Starton Oakmont, sued Prodigy because they didn't like something that was posted. Prodigy lost, causing or vastly accelerating their downfall. Savvy senator & one of the only people in Congress who understands technology Ron Wyden got 230 added to the DMCA, a fallen awful terrible piece of legislation that's been chipped away at, rolled back, as the one amazing incredibly positive shift, that's on par with Al Gore's work to allow priviitzed use of the internet in allowing online space to become a thing. We would have so little without 230. Shame shame shame on the fools, morons, and know nothing's who would post comments saying it should be withdrawal or repealed; none of us would have a forum to talk about such a thing online, none of us would be commenting at all, without 230. You monsters.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/02/hip-hip-hooray-hipster...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40618135
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/10/flourishing-internet-d...
If someone you have never heard of writes a letter -- on paper, with a pen, communicating some kind of message that is somehow restricted by law... whether it be libel, copyright infringement, offensive, or hate speech -- and I decide I like it so much that I want to send a copy of that letter in the mail to everyone in my town... I am sorry, is the intuition that the EFF is claiming here that I shouldn't be held liable, just because I in some way curated the message from someone else?
I mean, this person didn't even ask me to mail it... it isn't like I am running a newsletter for the town, having to filter out the best messages from the numerous I am sent, lest I run out of paper and my readers run out of time. No: the person who sent me that letter wanted some audience of theirs to read it, I was one of the people they sent it to, for all I know I was the only person they expected would ever read it, and now I am the reason a thousand people will.
In this scenario -- as with the examples from the EFF -- I plucked this message out of world and chose to send it to my audience... this isn't me merely deciding not to moderate it: this is more like a museum going out and hunting for pieces of art for an exhibit... is the exhibit itself somehow not an act of speech?
I dunno... I personally feel like, if anything, I should be held more liable than the person who wrote the original letter in this scenario, not less: I am the person who chose to give their message some immense audience, not them. If I try to now claim "I didn't say it... this other person did!", that's not only disingenuous, that borders on nonsensical, as if I want to say something false and bad about you, I bet I can find someone else who said something similar, and I shouldn't just to get to avoid accountability because I merely "forwarded it".
I think what the EFF is doing here is trying to claim that a law that has successfully defended a user is thereby a law that helps users; and... I do see the logic there? But--and I guess this is where the EFF and I really disagree--I'm going to say that, just because a law helps some user avoid accountability, that doesn't mean I want that user to avoid accountability! The law should make sense, not merely be a useful and powerful card to play during legal battles.
There is something else going on here, though, as I clicked on the links in this quoted section to see if I would agree with the scenarios being defended, and I feel like this phrasing was dubious and even downright misleading :/.
Take the "anyone who forwards an email" one that I am kind of poking at here... and that's not at all a good description of what happened, as the EFF website notes that the key issue at hand is whether the message has been intended to be forwarded: if not, Section 230 wouldn't apply... but like, that's the situation with most end-user email forwards, as end users aren't expected to run forwarding service!
More to the point, this was about a non-profit that runs a mailing list, a newsletter, and a mailing list, not a user. Sure: the court kind of leaned into the word "user" to make a newsletter and mailing list be an idea that could be managed under this law, but that technical definition of "user" clearly isn't what the EFF is trying to make us think of here.
But like, returning to the result: in this case, they actually did forward an email they received which clearly was not intended to be forwarded: if you read the email, that much is obvious. The actual user here, Smith, is the person I'd think we want to protect, not the non-profit that took their self-admittedly "crank" question and forwarded it to their serious mailing list and put it on their serious website as part of their ...
What about the detractors who claim it protects _all_ websites, regardless of size.
"The law is not a shield for Big Tech."
It is commonly understood that Section 230 is what allowed "Big Tech" to get so big. In fact, Big Tech's lawyers have argued this in front of the Supreme Court.
"Critically, the law benefits the millions of users who don't have the resources to build and host their own blogs, email services, or social media sites, and instead rely on services to host that speech."
"Section 230 protects individual bloggers, anyone who forwards an email, and social media users who have ever reshared or retweeted another person's content online."
According to EFF 230 protects people who don't have resources to host and it protects people who do have resources to host, e.g., individual bloggers, etc.
Then EFF tries to suggest 230 "is not a shield" for Big Tech. That 230 does not protect Big Tech.
No one hosts more than Big Tech and no one has Big Tech's resources. 230 protects Big Tech as much as anyone else. As a constant target of litigation that is dismissed on 230 grounds, arguably it protects Big Tech much more than anyoone else.
However the question is not who is or is not proetced by 230. The question is what effect 230 has on the internet.
230 is what allowed Big Tech to grow so large.
Every internet subscriber paying fees has the resources to host: a computer and an internet connection.
The assumption EFF makes is that the internet must be used for advertising (because reasons), and consequently it must be used to publish to large audiences suitable for advertising. That is what Big Tech does. Nothing requires the internet be used for such purposes. Big Tech requires it for their survival.
Big Tech solicits and exploits "user-generated content" for surveillance and advertising purposes.
230 also allows small websites publishing controversial information to survive, if they are targeted with litigation.
Who gets targeted more: (a) the small website hosting one person's content or (b) the mega-sized Big Tech website hosting the content of millions of people.
230 protects _all_ websites.
"As EFF has explained, online speech is frequently targeted with meritless lawsuits. Big Tech can afford to fight these lawsuits without Section 230."
230 does not discriminate between cases that have merit and those without merit. It prevents them all.
Big Tech does not want unfavourable decisions by courts relating to their operations. Decisions that might favor internet users. Big Tech can afford to fight but history shows it settles. It avoids trials that it could easily afford. Section 230 results in countless cases being dismissed that might lead to decisions, or at least settlements, favorable to internet users.
"Engine has estimated that without Section 230, many startups and small services would be inundated with costly litigation that could drive them offline. "
EFF reminds me of Mozilla. EFF wants to protect startups. It is like Mozilla wanting to protect the "advertising ecosystem"and claiming they are protecting privacy. Advertising services fund the invasion of privacy for the purpose of selling more advertising services.
These so-called "startups" that EFF is concerned about usually envy, emulate and often want to be acquired by Big Tech. EFF cannot claim to be on the side of "everyday internet users" and then proceed to campaign for the interests of "startups" that exist to exploit those internet users, conducting wanton under-the-radar surveillance to support noxious online advertising services. Big Tech once called themselves "startups". 230 enabled them to grow and become "Big Tech".
Perhaps the most concerning omission in this blog post is the failure of...