Ninth Circuit Tells Online Services: Section 230 Isn't For You
from the practical-effect dept
Last year we wrote about Homeaway and Airbnb's challenge to an ordinance in Santa Monica that would force them to monitor their Santa Monica listings to ensure they were legally compliant. The Santa Monica ordinance, like an increasing number of ordinances around the country, requires landlords wanting to list their properties on these services to register with the city and meet various other requirements. That part of the ordinance is not what causes concern, however. It may or may not be good local policy, but it in no way undermines Section 230's crucial statutory protection for platforms for Santa Monica officials to attempt to hold their landlord users liable if they go online to say they have a non-compliant rental listing.
The problem with the ordinance is that it does not just impose liability on landlords. It also imposes liability on the platforms hosting their listings. The only way for them to avoid that liability is to engage in the onerous, if not outright impossible, task of scrutinizing whether or not the listings on their platforms are legal. Which is exactly what Section 230 exists to prevent: forcing platforms to monitor their users' speech for legality, because if they had to police them, they would end up facilitating a lot less legitimate speech.
Yet that's what the Ninth Circuit decided to let Santa Monica do – force platforms to monitor their user-generated speech – in a decision earlier this week upholding the district court's refusal to enjoin the ordinance.
Of course, that's not how the court saw it, however. To the court, platforms weren't being forced to police the speech they hosted. They were merely obligated to police the rental transactions they facilitated.
[T]he Ordinance does not require the Platforms to monitor third-party content and thus falls outside of the CDA’s immunity … [T]he only monitoring that appears necessary in order to comply with the Ordinance relates to incoming requests to complete a booking transaction—content that, while resulting from the third party listings, is distinct, internal, and nonpublic. [p. 13-14]
However this is a distinction without a difference.
As we pointed out in the amicus brief the Copia Institute filed in support of Homeaway and Airbnb, these listings are indeed user-generated speech. It may be speech that's extremely limited in scope, little more than "I have housing to rent," but it is still user speech that, per the ordinance, may not always be legal to say. The problem is that this ordinance in effect is all about passing on liability to the platform if they allow this speech to be illegally said, which is no different than trying to pass on liability to a platform for any other speech its users may illegally say.
Yet in its decision the court insisted that platform liability attaches to something entirely apart from its role as a platform facilitating user speech:
Similarly, here, the Ordinance is plainly a housing and rental regulation. The “inevitable effect of the [Ordinance] on its face” is to regulate nonexpressive conduct—namely, booking transactions—not speech. [p. 19-20]
It went on to declare that the ordinance in no way forces platforms to monitor user content:
Contrary to the Platforms’ claim, the Ordinance does not “require” that they monitor or screen [listings]. It instead leaves them to decide how best to comply with the prohibition on booking unlawful transactions. [p. 20]
At every step in its reasoning it kept treating the ordinance as something wholly apart from an ordinance impacting speech:
Nor can the Platforms rely on the Ordinance’s “stated purpose” to argue that it intends to regulate speech. The Ordinance itself makes clear that the City’s “central and significant goal . . . is preservation of its housing stock and preserving the quality and nature of residential neighborhoods.” As such, with respect to the Platforms, the only inevitable effect, and the stated purpose, of the Ordinance is to prohibit them from completing booking transactions for unlawful rentals. [p. 20]
But no amount of handwaving by the court to try to focus on the financial transaction between landlord and renter, or insistence that this ordinance doesn't force platforms to monitor user-generated speech, will change the basic reality that it does indeed force platforms to do exactly that: police user speech for legality in order to avoid liability arising from that speech. It is exactly the sort of situation Section 230 was intended to forestall because of the inevitable chilling effect fear-driven platform monitoring obligations have on online speech and innovation.
The court seemed to try to justify its contorted reasoning by noting that because "brick and mortar" businesses have to comply with all sorts of local regulations, Internet businesses also should have to.
We have consistently eschewed an expansive reading of the statute that would render unlawful conduct “magically . . . lawful when [conducted] online,” and therefore “giv[ing] online businesses an unfair advantage over their real-world counterparts.” For the same reasons, while we acknowledge the Platforms’ concerns about the difficulties of complying with numerous state and local regulations, the CDA does not provide internet companies with a one-size-fits-all body of law. Like their brick-and-mortar counterparts, internet companies must also comply with any number of local regulations concerning, for example, employment, tax, or zoning. [p. 16]
But this thinking fails to recognize the unique differences between brick and mortar businesses and Internet business, differences that help explain why it is so important to give Internet businesses this vital protection. After all, a brick and mortar store only has to comply with the laws of the jurisdiction where the store is located – as Internet platforms also need to, in the finite number of places where they have a physical or corporate presence. But when it comes to their online presence, an Internet business is everywhere and thus theoretically exposed to the laws of every single jurisdiction, no matter how onerous these laws are, or how much they may conflict with any other's.
Because while perhaps the Santa Monica ordinance may not be too onerous for the platforms to comply with in and of itself, Santa Monica is but one city, yet the Ninth Circuit has now given the green light to every other city in every other state to come up with their own ordinances that will similarly force platforms to monitor user content. As Congress feared in 1996 when it passed Section 230, this decision now invites platforms to divert resources better spent elsewhere, overly censor user speech, withdraw from entire markets – even those that might prefer to have these services available – or risk being bankrupted by an infinite number of local jurisdictions pulling them in every possible direction.
This result is chilling not just to these platforms but to any other innovative service, especially if the service has any effect in the offline world, as so many do, or facilitates economic transactions between users, as so many also do. If bearing these indicia are enough to cause a platform to lose its Section 230 protection, then few will be able to retain it.
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Filed Under: 9th circuit, california, cda 230, housing, intermediary liability, internet, platforms, santa monica, section 230, speech
Companies: airbnb, homeaway
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"This result is chilling"
... good summary of this case & court decision
Problem here, of course, is loss of rule of law.
The Ninth Circuit Court is notoriously leftist/activist... just like the local government politicians running the Peoples Republic of Santa Monica.
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NOT MAGIC 'cause on teh internets? Businesses STILL liable?
HA, HA! So Masnick / this supposed lawyer AGAIN WRONG in BIG way!
And that's the liberal 9th Circuit.
Now, WHO was right yet again?
And no, this one is NOT going to be overturned. It's solid law: NOT MAGIC 'cause on teh internets.
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Re: NOT MAGIC 'cause on teh internets? Businesses STILL liable?
By the way: one of the KEY points is that the renters are doing BUSINESS.
Section 230 looks still intact for "users", The Public, with their opinions. -- However, will be another loss for Masnick when the exact case comes up over whether "platforms" are authorized to control The Public's speech / access for opinions. The arbitrary "deplatforming" will be ruled illegal: it's simply not the purpose of Section 230 to make "platforms" immune AND empower them to censor.
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Re: Re: NOT MAGIC 'cause on teh internets? Businesses STILL liab
Just lying, as usual.
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Re: Re: NOT MAGIC 'cause on teh internets? Businesses STILL liab
Actually, that is the EXACT purpose of Section 230.
The question is whether or not 230 should ever have covered "distributor" liability, such as a bookstore put on notice that a book on its shelves is defamatory. A distributor is not the "publisher or speaker," and Congress couod have added the word. That it didn't suggests they never intended 230 to reach that far. What they were trying to protect was someone like Prodigy being sued in the morning over what someone posted on a board or sent in an e-mail in the middle of the night.
Notice-and-takedown for defamation would work fine, particularly because those who do the defaming wouldn't be so quick to waive service of a lawsuit, and therefore won't counter the notice.
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Re: Re: Re: NOT MAGIC 'cause on teh internets? Businesses STILL
What do you mean by "like" Prodigy, and what services that are "not like" Prodigy do you suppose Congress didn't intend to protect with this definition?
"The term “interactive computer service” means any information service, system, or access software provider that provides or enables computer access by multiple users to a computer server, including specifically a service or system that provides access to the Internet and such systems operated or services offered by libraries or educational institutions."
Also, what does the timing of the middle of the night and the following morning have to do with it? There is no such language in section 230.
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Re: NOT MAGIC 'cause on teh internets? Businesses STILL liable?
I’d just like to point out that this is a (relatively) leftist position to take; being opposed to it is more libertarian than liberal. If you expect liberal bias from the Ninth Circuit, this isn’t that surprising.
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There are four lights
My mom is starting to lose her mind and although we respect her still, we don't listen when she spouts insanity. The 9th circuit seems to be trying to create new laws that it wishes existed instead of sticking to reality. Maybe we need to replace all of the judges that keep producing these horrible results. If you keep getting the majority of your cases overturned, you are the problem.
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Re: There are four lights
Then all District Courts need to be replaced, because every district court has had a majority of their cases reaching the Supreme Court to be overturned, and the 9th is not -- and has never been -- the most overturned district court during any time period of one year or greater.
Of course, having the majority of your Supreme Court cases overturned and the majority of your cases overturned is very different. In 2014, the 9th Circuit had 16 cases reach the Supreme Court, of which it had 10 overturned. (The 8th Circuit had 7 of 8 overturned, for comparison.)
These 10 overturned cases were part of 12,000 cases heard by the 9th Circuit that year. That means 99.92% of their cases were not overturned.
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Re: Re: There are four lights
Wrong stat. What you're referring to is the SCOTUS physical inability to hear the volume of cases the 9th spews forth.
No matter how bad the caselaw they produce, they will always have 99% plus no overturned.
You took a situation which requires a qualitative analysis and applied a quantitative analysis
The real question is - just how crazy and unjustifiable are the 9ths decisions and the answer is, they've literally set themselves up as their own legislative branch with supra-Presidential Executive powers for good measure.
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I disagree.
I disagree that it is speech being monitored by this decision.
It is a transaction being monitored, and it perfectly lines up with previous court decisions about transactions.
Banks can get in big trouble if people use their services to send money to or from illegal sources.
Online marketplaces like eBay or Amazon can get in big trouble if people use their site to buy or sell illegal items, even if eBay or Amazon never possessed or promoted or distributed the items.
In this case, it is illegal to rent a house to someone if you are not a registered landlord. These landlords are using the site's services to rent the house.
It's not merely an advertisement like Craiglist, where the seller has to contact the buyer and pay some other way. It's like eBay, where the object is put up for sale and paid for through the service.
The obvious solution does not do harm to the speech of landlords. AirBNB just has to require that potential sellers submit proof of registration, in order to list a home for rent. I don't see any way that this differs from Uber requiring Uber drivers to submit proof that they possess a valid driver's license.
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Re: I disagree.
Online marketplaces like eBay or Amazon can get in big trouble if people use their site to buy or sell illegal items, even if eBay or Amazon never possessed or promoted or distributed the items.
This is the wrong analogy. Amazon and eBay can be liable in two cases, neither of which apply here. If they themselves are the ones posting the item for sale (more an Amazon issue than an eBay one) and secondly, in some very limited cases, for counterfeit goods -- and only because CDA 230 does not cover trademark. However, in the Tiffany case, the court found that there is a defacto safe harbor for even trademarked goods, even outside of CDA 230.
For items posted by marketplace users? The platforms are definitely protected by 230.
So... not a good example
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Re: Re: I disagree.
The Amazon case disagrees with you. Third-party sellers, not officially tied to Amazon, were the source of the illegal pesticides. The big difference between AirBNB is that Amazon was involved with shipping the product, and not just the transfer of money in exchange for the product... but they did not post the item for sale, or give it any special treatment not given to any other third party using Amazon to sell a product.
Another relevant case that does not involve any physical transfer: in the early 2000's, PayPal was fined $10 million for allowing people to use PayPal to transfer money for illegal gambling.
One thing that does work in favor of AirBNB is this part of the Tiffany ruling: eBay "sufficiently protects buyers by canceling auctions reported to the VeRO program as believed to be infringing."
One thing that does not work in favor of AirBNB: the actual ordinance doesn't require them to remove anything. It doesn't prevent them from listing anything. It only requires them to match a transaction to a registry.
"Hosting platforms shall not complete any booking transaction for any residential property or unit unless it is listed on the City’s registry created under Section 6.20.020 subsection (b), at the time the hosting platform receives a fee for the booking transaction."
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Re: Re: Re: I disagree.
Actually online betting was never illegal, just moving money across state lines.
It's bookmaking (profiting from gambling) that is illegal. Two people betting a game never was.
Many of the bookies had agents onshore who would settle up with the bettors in each direction, and that's why they left the US.
Now that it's legal, perhaps Jay Cohen can have his conviction expunged. He actually flew back to the US to challenge the law and wound up in prison for a few years.
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Re: Re: I disagree.
Soon we won't be able to bid on Shatner's old toupee.
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Re: I disagree.
There are differences, and here are two:-
1) Anybody driving a car is required to have a license. Some cities will require a 'license' for short term rental landlords, others won't.
2) I assume you know what a drivers license looks like, but what does a particular cities landlord license' look like?
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Re: Re: I disagree.
Not necessarily. Some places have exemptions, such as places in Alaska that are too remote to have a DMV.
Do you know, on sight, what all 50 state drivers licenses look like, along with a DC license and non-REAL ID licenses where they exist? Neither do I. That's why they just take the license number, run a quick check, and be done with it.
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Re: Re: Re: I disagree.
Fair enough, but where do they go to carry out a quick check to find out if a registration is needed for property rental, and then then whether the person offering the rental is registered?? Do they check at town level, do they check at county level, or is is it something to check at state level.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: I disagree.
Just like any other law: check all jurisdictions applicable to the transaction. Does the federal government require registration? No? How about the state? No? Does the county? No? How about the town? Yep, check town registry.
They're already required to do fancy math like this when it comes to taxes.
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Re: Re: I disagree.
It's called the Reigster of Deeds.
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Re: I disagree.
It seems you missed the point. The decision os wrong because AirBnB is being held responsible for the speech of a landlord. This decision is the same as holding the manufacturer of a sheet of paper for what was printed on it. AirBnB should not have any risk associated with it for facilitating a conversation between two parties ( or more ). If some law is being broken in this advertisement, that is on the Landlord. AirBnB does not make any declaration to anyone that they shoukd break any law. In fact read the terms of usage and you find that they require all users comply with local laws.
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Re: Re: I disagree.
Or like holding gun manufacturers liable for a mass shooting:
https://www.jurist.org/news/2019/03/connecticut-supreme-court-allows-sandy-hook-shooting-v ictims-families-to-proceed-in-firearms-industry-lawsuit/
Oops.
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Re: Re: I disagree.
"A hosting platform shall not complete any booking transaction for any residential property or unit unless it is listed on the City’s registry created under Section 6.20.020 subsection (b), at the time the hosting platform receives a fee for the booking transaction."
It's not an advertisement, it's a transaction going through AirBNB, like making a payment by check. If your bank allows you to send or receive money from illegal sources, such as sanctioned individuals, your bank is in trouble.
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Re: Re: Re: I disagree.
That leads to an obvious change AirBNB could make to comply with this law: stop handling money and bookings for that city. Just show the ad (for a flat fee) and allow people to contact whoever posted it. How could a court claim that's not speech?
A clever property owner could link their ad to a generic online storefront with each date being a "product" with 1 in stock. The storefront operator would have no idea what city they're associated with, so couldn't be expected to comply with this law.
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Re: I disagree.
I don't see any way that this differs from Uber requiring Uber drivers to submit proof that they possess a valid driver's license.
All you had to say. And, it is an almost perfect analogy
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Re: Re: I disagree.
So by trying NOT to be Craigslist, they lose the immunity that Craigslist has.
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Re: Re: Re: I disagree.
So by not trying to be a travel agent, you are a travel agent?
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Re: I disagree.
It is the government privatising the enforcement of regulations, with added punishment for a private party if they fail to enforce government regulations on other people.
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Re: I disagree.
Which would be fine, if AirBNB were located in the city in question. However, if AirBNB are actually serving LLs in multiple towns, and tenants coming from multiple states, then it would need to be aware of which bodies of law might apply.
For landlords, AirBNB would need to know which law appliesy to the property. There can be rental regulations, licensing requirements, tax collections, durational and repetitional requirements. Some or all may apply. They will need attorneys to interpret the law and follow changes in each property's location.
For tenants, AirBNB will need to know whether they are allowed to travel and convert money. The restrictions may be by state (e.g. cannot convert rubles or east-marks), or by individual (ankle monitor does not permit you in this area).
This presumes that everyone is fully informed and forthright about their locations, applicable laws, and the like.
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Re: Re: I disagree.
But AirBnB already has to do this for assessing county and local taxes when it calculates it's fee for connecting the landlord and the renter.
You and the original author forget that AirBnB is not just letting landords post listing, but AirBnB is as a part of each post by sorting and curration and part of each transaction because AirBnB takes a cut of each listing and the fee's charged.
That removes AirBnB's unlimited section 230 privaliges. 230 while rightly broad isn't a pancea to complete immunity. AirBnB is taking money from illegal transactions, and is facilitating and arranging illegal transactions to take place. 230 is not designed to shield companies from legal action when the company itself is a part of the illegal transaction in both facilitation and profiting from said transaction.
You're advocating an understanding of the law that would allow a company to become a murder for higher app, take listings and requests from hitman and people looking to have someone killed, collect money from the transaction and claim "Nope. Can't touch us. We have 230 immunity because we aren't the ones doing the hits nor requesting the hits. We just facilitate the connection between willing hitmen and murder requestors. And take a percentage plus flat fee of the amount transacted." And that's kinda nonsense.
It doesn't matter that what is in this case is illegal room rentals instead of murder for higher. The action itself is validly illegal. It's unquestionable that the city has the power to do what it's doing with regards to the landlords.
You both are just waving around "Free Speech on the Internet" and "Slipper Sloop!" to justify a techbro solution to a bunch of tax cheats and scofflaws.
If AirBnB was just a forum for people to arrange this stuff on their own then yes, they would and should have full section 230 immunity. But because AirBnB is making money off each transaction and each listing, AirBnB is a direct part to the listing and not a mere 3rd party in the first place, even if AirBnB isn't the actual writer of the listing, AirBnB is profiting from the listing.
It is reasonable to expect AirBnB to make sure that the transactions it profits off of and the listings it profits off of to are in fact not illegal.
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Margarine melts at 110𝆩, and butter at 98.6𝆩, feel that?
I think the issue is how the 9th Circuit thinks that a local ordinance can overcome Federal law?
Should the rental agreement fit the local laws? Most certainly. The question that the 9th Circuit ignores is how does a platform, chosen by a local business, determine what is or is not legal?
Becoming not only conversant in the local laws of each and every municipality in the US (not to mention the rest of the world) is something not even lawyers expect to arise to. But to assume that a, well lets use a lease for example, lease is legal in all its terms would not only take a lawyer, but likely a court for final determination.
Is the 9th Circuit giving up the court's responsibility in making that final determination, and giving it over to the platforms, or is it suggesting that the platforms second guess what a court might rule? Then, what if a court decides that what the platform determined was actually wrong. Having been forced into making a decision, in hundreds of municipalities, how could they not be wrong sometimes. Which leaves platforms liable for the wrong doings of those that wrote the lease trying to force some illegality upon the renters.
Just because I own a car and pay taxes to maintain the roads does not mean that I am responsible for those bank robbers over there who use not only a car that might be the same make, model, and year as mine, but had the arrogance to use the roads I help to maintain via taxes to effect their getaway, make me liable for their actions.
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Re: Margarine melts at 110𝆩, and butter at 98.6𝆩, feel tha
"Just because I own a car and pay taxes to maintain the roads does not mean that I am responsible for those bank robbers over there who use not only a car that might be the same make, model, and year as mine, but had the arrogance to use the roads I help to maintain via taxes to effect their getaway, make me liable for their actions."
That's not a comparable situation at all. That would be more comparable to you, a landlord using AirBNB to sell a two-story one-bathroom house in Townsville, being held liable for a different landlord using AirBNB to sell a two-story one-bathroom house in Townsville illegally. The membership fees or percentages of sales used to maintain the website are far more optional and personal in nature than taxes used to maintain roads, and the outcome is still insane.
What would be more comparable would be if you ran an auction for third parties to sell cars, and someone was able to sell a stolen car at that auction because you never checked whether that seller held a valid title for their car.
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Re: Re: Margarine melts at 110𝆩, and butter at 98.6𝆩, feel
I think that platform liability does relate, and is comparable. They follow the laws put out for them, and those are Federal laws (assuming they are based in the US) because they are interstate rather than local laws.
The difference between some platform checking the registration or title of a car for sale and verifying that the seller was actually the owner is a lot different than a platform reading a lease or sales agreement (assuming those are actually available) and determining legality is huge. The former is possibly possible with some limitations such as the seller telling the truth about their identity. The latter is a question that is not actually discernible by a platform, without a court.
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Re: Re: Re: Margarine melts at 110𝆩, and butter at 98.6𝆩,
Complete legality is not something they have to determine in this ordinance.
All that a host has to do is "not complete any booking transaction for any residential property or unit unless it is listed on the City’s registry created under Section 6.20.020 subsection (b), at the time the hosting platform receives a fee for the booking transaction."
Very easily discernable by AirBNB. In fact, although I would highly suggest it should be, it doesn't even necessarily require human interaction and could be fully automated.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Margarine melts at 110𝆩, and butter at 98.6
You look at it as having to deal with one towns requirements. Now look at it from the perspective of any town that they have renters using their site from. How do they even discover if there are any local regulations that they are meant to comply with?
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Then it's not very different from a delivery company like FedEx having to discover local driving regulations, or face liability for an accident caused by one of their drivers failing to meet these regulations.
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Re:
Do you have learn thousands of local regulations to drive across the US, or can you rely on general laws and street signs?
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Re: Margarine melts at 110𝆩, and butter at 98.6𝆩, feel tha
It's much worse than that; there are almost 20,000 municipalities in the US.
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LOL! Techdirt is upset that the courts rejected their ridiculous argument that a website should be able to process Illegal transactions for profit with impunity. This place is hilariously entertaining.
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Re:
You want to rent a property in a town on the other side of the country, and you will be held liable if the renter is breaking any local ordinances in renting to you. The renter does not have the necessary permissions to rent out their property. How do you find that out, and would it be fair if you are fined for the renters failings if you actually rent the property?
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Re:
This is the same circuit which held Visa harmless even for knowingly processing illegal transactions by those who had pirated Perfect 10's images, claiming that "some other processor" would have stepped in and Visa therefore didn't control the activity.
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Re:
Visa beat Perfect 10 with this very argument in a copyright case.
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Are newspapers held responsible for the ads placed by renters and such in the classified and other pages?
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Re:
Why do you imagine that's relevant?
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Re:
Yes they are, though the Seventh Circuit didn't even hold online platforms liable for fair-housing and employment-discrimination violations.
Looks like the 9th wants the SCOTUS to take a look at Section 230, which it has yet to do in over twenty years (that itself is a story by now).
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Re: Re:
No, they aren't.
Are you just going full retard now?
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Time for Airbnb to geoblock Santa Monica
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Re:
Time for all of us to geoblock Santa Monica. Let us keep their ideas from spreading.
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How about a ruling that says the City of Santa Monica is responsible for ensuring compliance via some type of enhanced registration which shifts the burden of labor off of AirBnb?
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Re:
It already is.
In full:
Means you pay the local tax to AirBNB, and AirBNB pays the tax to the city, instead of paying the city directly.
Same thing is already required of standard rentals.
This is the part AirBB does not like. They're not forced to remove anything, only to not allow any transactions (which they profit from) to be completed if the property is not properly listed with the city.
In other words, AirBNB can't charge you for sending you a list of local entertainment or hooking you up with a tour or calling in a maid for you. They can still do that if they want, but it has to be a free service.
Finally, none of the other restrictions that apply to hosts apply to host platforms, except for further things relating to section b and providing information about rentals when demanded.
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Re: Re:
6.20.050 Hosting platform responsibilities.
(a) Hosting platforms shall be responsible for collecting all applicable TOTs and remitting the same to the City. The hosting platform shall be considered an agent of the host for purposes of TOT collections and remittance responsibilities as set forth in Chapter 6.68 of this Code.
Means you pay the local tax to AirBNB, and AirBNB pays the tax to the city, instead of paying the city directly.
(b) Subject to applicable laws, hosting platforms shall disclose to the City on a regular basis each home-sharing and vacation rental listing located in the City, the names of the persons responsible for each such listing, the address of each such listing, the length of stay for each such listing and the price paid for each stay.
Same thing is already required of standard rentals.
(c) Hosting platforms shall not complete any booking transaction for any residential property or unit unless it is listed on the City’s registry created under Section 6.20.020 subsection (b), at the time the hosting platform receives a fee for the booking transaction.
This is the part AirBB does not like. They're not forced to remove anything, only to not allow any transactions (which they profit from) to be completed if the property is not properly listed with the city.
(d) Hosting platforms shall not collect or receive a fee, directly or indirectly through an agent or intermediary, for facilitating or providing services ancillary to a vacation rental or unregistered home-share, including, but not limited to, insurance, concierge services, catering, retaurant bookings, tours, guide services, entertainment, cleaning, property management, or maintenance of the residential property or unit.
In other words, AirBNB can't charge you for sending you a list of local entertainment or hooking you up with a tour or calling in a maid for you. They can still do that if they want, but it has to be a free service.
(e) Safe Harbor. A hosting platform operating exclusively on the Internet, which operates in compliance with subsections (a), (b), (c), and (d) above, shall be presumed to be in compliance with this Chapter, except that the hosting platform remains responsible for compliance with the administrative subpoena provisions of this Chapter.
Finally, none of the other restrictions that apply to hosts apply to host platforms, except for further things relating to section b and providing information about rentals when demanded.
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When one thinks of AirBNB as a platform things might look a bit different. When one thinks of AirBNB as the rental agent in each and every case things become a bit different.
What I mean is, why is the city holding the platform liable, rather than the property owner? It sure seems the City of Santa Monica is trying to regulate the Web, rather than the rental business within their city.
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The platform is profiting off of these transactions, and is only liable to check whether the transaction is a legal transaction when they are being paid to perform the transaction.
This is... exactly what every other rental agent in the nation does, is it not? Charges a fee to help renters and owners find each other, and if the transaction is illegal, they've just directly profited from an illegal sale.
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This seems like an attack on the Internet, rather than a method to make the responsible parties liable for what they are in fact liable for. Why doesn't the law make the property owners liable (as they probably are but given the fast moving consequences of short term rentals difficult to collect)?
The seemingly static aspect of an Internet platform appears to be an easy target as apposed to some property owner who does a few quick and dirty vacation rentals in between their longer term rentals, or something.
Why isn't the law wrong, rather than the platform?
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That part isn't what AirBNB was suing over. That's regarding taxes based on the sale, which the Supreme Court has decided last year is fully legal.
AirBNB was only suing over (c), the part that says they can't get paid for their part in a sale unless they check to make sure the property is legally allowed to be sold.
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The platform is enabling violations of the law.
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So is breathing.
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Actually, the offline equivalent would be that a landlord couldn't evict someone until their property was up to code. Just make it so that you can't evict an AirBnB "guest" if the host didn't comply with the law.
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We want money, you will give it to us!
You will bear all the costs to get us the money!
Who do they think they are? A copyright cartel?
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Airbnb and the like could simply move their operations outside of the United States.
The City Of Santa Monica cannot apply its ordinance on a website that is not in the United States.
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Liberals won't see this, because the govt. making sure everthing is Fair is the whole point of govt. for them-and the fairer the better- but this is how Socialism kills prosperity, one regulation at a time.
There oughtta be a law!
The bottom line is the effect is 180 degrees from the intent.
Liberals are distinguished by two properties.
One is a tendency to become enraged at disparate results between individuals.
The other is a distrust in anything not consciously directed towards a moral goal by explicitly moral human intent.
Thus capitalism is "irredeemable" despite it, and not Communism or Socialism, having delivered all of modernity to the world.
Socialism in all its forms , National, People's Revolutionary, radical, Worker's, New, etc. can never kill enough people nor capitalism lift enough people out of abject poverty to cause a leftist to see the error in their thinking because its hard wired into them from birth.
The fact is, leftism is a disease
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Luke Skywalker says:
"Amazing. Every word of what you just said was wrong."
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Funny that, almost every country in the top ten best countries to live in are Social Democratic.
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-best-countries-to-live-in-the-world.html
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffreydorfman/2018/07/08/sorry-bernie-bros-but-nordic-countries-are-no t-socialist/#bc9cea474ad3
It's a trope, not a fact.
That doesn't even get into the fact that the UK and Sweden and much of the EU can't really be called "democratic" anymore owing to their draconic supression of political WrongThink via so called hatespeech laws which literally outlaw ideas.
Not to mention the "keep voting till you get it right" approach to popular referendums Britain and Ireland have.
These facts are not disconnected. Socialism leads to govt. control over what you what you buy, how you can buy it, what you can say, think, eat and how long your candle's wick can be -look it up.
It's a progressive mental disease as I described and it ends in Venezuela, which used to be every liberal's favorite example of successful socialism.
Look at France today. Look at Paris. Look at Sweden which will have minority indiginent Swedes in two generations or less.
The people don't want their govts. or their policies, but the govt. literally outlaws opposing political parties and otherwise supresses dissent by all means possible.
That's socialism. If Sean Penn and the rest of the liberal left is praising your country ala Cuba and Vz., rest assured you'll be fighting over roadkill before the decade is out.
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The definition of "socialism" has expanded to include removing various parts of the capitalist equation. Single-payer healthcare is socialist in that it is government control over the health-insurance industry (as is with Medicare, you are not allowed to buy private insurance if eligible for it). Student loans are a hybrid, but flood insurance is not.
The 2009 bailouts were socialist in spirit, with government controlling the financial system (a good thing!), after the capitalists chose to whine rather than suck it up and rebuild. Social Security is thought of as socialist even though it is not the only retirement account.
Today's "socialists" are generally people who support providing for the basic needs of every citizen (housing, employment, medical care, and education), by having government control the flow of each to prevent people from doing without. Sometimes that means the government is a "pure socialist" but usually it's just a hybrid in which government plays an expanded role.
By that definition, Nordic countries are definitely socialist.
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You just know nothing that's all. Some of your Nordic countries don't even have a minimum wage, Look it up, They are capitilist through and through , but with high taxes and a big wefare state and , historically small culturally cohesive populations which led to high trust, low crime, low welfare useage societies.
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Just because you call it a trope doesn't mean it is, and because someone calls social democracy for "compassionate capitalism" doesn't change the fact that the countries are social democratic.
Please elaborate on this, because as of this instance I've haven't seen any suppression of ideas unless your think racism, misogyny, religious bigotry etc. are ideas worth promoting?
Well, at least the voters get to vote compared to some other countries that employs shady tactics to make it harder for disenfranchised people to vote - like gerrymandering, changing voting venues etc etc.
As opposed to a government bought by corporations where the people has free speech which means jack shit.
It never was any liberal's favorite example, some left-wingers and communists probably cheered on though. Chavez gutted the country in 13 years by pandering to the masses while setting up a system that amounted to a kleptocracy of massive proportions, Maduro just kept going. Why Venezuela crashed has extremely little to do with socialism.
Do you know what's going on in Paris? Do you know why the yellow vests are protesting? Hint: it has nothing to do with socialism.
Says who? You got any hard facts and citations for that? (Hint: Breitbart doesn't count)
Says who? You got any hard facts and citations for that? (Hint: Breitbart doesn't count)
You have no idea what socialism is, you are just parroting the right-wing paranoia which is based on the old scary stories of the communist threat that equated socialism with communism.
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Sorry but this is stupid:
doesn't change the fact that the countries are social democratic.
Think. Are you defending a label or a set of policies. They can call themselves whatever they want, the fact is they are capitalist not Socialist. So they use the S word. So did Hitler. Actually National Socialism WAS socialism- a command economy where the govt. told everyone what they could or could not do, sell, hire, buy, think, do and speak of.
I am going to assume you know what the laws are like in the UK and what the hate speech laws entail in the EU, but you think that's OK because "you don't like those ideas".
This is what I mean when I say liberals can't process counter-intuitive facts.
Fact- speaking and writing (and YouTubing and Tweeting) is effectively the operating system of civilization. We know what we should do because we entertain all ideas and consider them on their merits.
By banning speech-you-hatre you are merely imitating the Soviet union and the 3rd Reich and Mao. They all knew what was what morally and they enforced it with a bullet to the head (which they also had a monopoly on, along with RightThink.)
By definition, hard truths are distasteful to hear. Of course people don't say "that is distasteful" they say "that leads inevitably to bad real world consequence A B and C and therefore to prevent those consequences we must ban that speech"!
This is EXACTLY what all those regimes claimed. EXACTLY.
Slavery had been around since the beginning of time in all civilizations. However, once England and the European nations freed themselves of despotic "I will tell you what you can say" Big-Man-ery, during the Enlightenment , a debate ensued.
Under your rules, no debate would be permitted.
I know you think you represent the stopping point, or at least the non-regressing point of all civilizational development and would never make their mistakes, but you're wrong. That's just your primary narcissism.
Here is an example.
Suppose Black people are largely genetically 20 points lower in IQ than Asians and many are even lower than that and there's nothing to be done about it no matter what you try.
I know how angry reading that idea makes, it's why I wrote it, and in the EU that speech is banned and I would be getting a knock on my door from the police.
But IF that were true, then society has a humane duty to accommodate them and not waste resources past a certain point pretending it's not. Society should then set a different standard for say, criminal mischief and take a different approach to criminal punishment and NOT expect people can just pull themselves up by the bootstraps because that would be cruel to this population.
Following the EU prescription, we never know this true fact about the world. Because it's forbidden knowledge, we act like it's not true. We're reduced to being witches instead of Doctors because what makes for modern medicine is banned. We just go on year after year, creating a rolling disaster for real people's lives out of a sense of not wanting to offend anyone.
Now I am going to finish my tale.
Suppose when we finally seriously study exactly why Blacks are less intelligent, we discover they have or lack a gene involved in the rate of synthesis of some enzyme involved in the biological pathway which when things are all said and done effectively determine how intelligent someone is going to be.
Because we were studying this in the first place just directly , because we did not forbid ourselves this hard truth, we found a way to control this pathway.
At the end of the day, people who, through no fault of their own had been handicapped in a way which made their lives especially hard have been liberated- really liberated.
The thing is, as offensive as that story is to you, it is exactly the way the world is, not wrt to Black intelligence- I just used that example to outrage you- but wrt to knowledge about the real world generally. The real world doesn't gie a shit about what offends you and for exactly that reason, you can't let offense bar any speech at all or we will never know reality.
Free speech and thought- completely unfettered - is the only tool we have to know the world and understand it as it really is.
In Sweden you can't say we should have less immigration from North Africa- the lowest IQ in the world. . You can't have a political party that advocates for that or even talks about it. As a direct consequence, National Socialism is getting more popular. If you forbid people from talking about something doesn't mean they will be drawn to ideologies that don't forbid them from talking and discussing that thing.,
That is a direct consequence of YOUR policies.
JFK said , nations that make dissent impossible make revolution inevitable. If war breaks out in the EU it will be because the EU tried to control dissent,.
What is the alternative?
Let people talk about anything they want and let people reply to that talk. Let the argument be had and exposed and gone over and finally disposed of. Everywhere where that is permitted or has been permitted peaceful equitable societies arise. Where it is not, unstable, inequitable societies are formed.
The Paris protests are the WORKING CLASS protesting against, formally, a gas tax Macron the Great levied on everyone to Stop Global Warming Now ! Deeper down they're about immigration and the enlightened socialist elite ramming down let them eat cake policies which are destroying France for France's indigenous population.
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Ah, you had to drag National Socialism in. You know why they called their party Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei? They changed their name to pander to the working class, the only socialist thing about the party was their extreme version of social Darwinism - everything else was more or less pure fascism.
And some on the right call everyone not agreeing with them for liberals. See how easy it is to generalize.
There is one thing to promote an idea, but if the core of the idea is hate in one form or another it's not much of an idea to begin with.
It doesn't make me angry at all, if there is valid data from which that determination can be drawn I'll happily accept it.
No, because if it is presented as fact that can be verified and not as an "attack" it's not hate speech according to most countries laws. Although, we both know some people will scream bloody murder anyway because they can't separate fact from their emotional bagage.
The problem is that when the talk promotes stereotypes, hate, bigotry etc it's passed the point of "just talk". We know that many people will never re-examine their beliefs in these matters, no matter how much people point out how wrong they are with supplied facts.
For example, do you think it would be okay for ISIS to put up billboards promoting the destruction of the western countries so they can recruit young, easily impressionable muslims?
If not, why? Where do you draw the line what is just talk and what is hate?
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OK
1) You need to look at the laws the EU has passed against parties that advocate against immigration based on the source nation of the immigrant. If you think my though experiment would be OK in those nations, you just are misinformed. You cannot say we need less immigration from North Africa, You also cannot append the qualifier " because they have (provably) low IQ" to make it legal. So there is no chance you can investigate the source of lower Black IQ.
I don't blame you for your beliefs . You are ignorant of what is going on and that's because you're getting your information from sources who hide what is going to from you.
All I can hope is conversations like this will pique your curiosity a little and you'll quietly, perhaps skeptically plunge into sites whose views you hate to see if they are presenting a set of significant, relevant facts to you of which you were previously held ignorant by information sources you trusted.
2) How can you know stereotypes aren't correct- don't hod hard truths which are valuable cultural knowledge ? Why do you get to say "no. seteroeotype- that's hate and causes real physical harm to people so that's so called hate speech ?
How do you KNOW that there is no truth to stereotypes? Through what means did you acquire that certain information?
Even if there was no truth to them, it still is not for you to say "you can't say that". I dont' need to have a justification for that, although I have plenty, because it's not for you to decide what ideas people can have.
America has done a bang up in its jurisprudence distinguishing speech which is illegal- shouting fire in a crowded theater- from speech which is not- advocating for ISIS.
Advocating for ISIS is perfectly legal. No one is America is arrested for this. So it taking out a billboard for the same. What you get arrested for is plotting to take some action, including joining ISIS. There are plenty of mosques that advocate for Sharia Law too. Perfectly legal.
We have free speech down. We do this very very well. The net effect is destructive ideas do NOT take hold. Nazis are not even a rounding error in the population. Ditto Klansmen and others. All the hurtful ideas of the past have been defeated precisely because we have free speech.
But it doesn't matter because that is not the reason you don't ' get to decide what people can and can't say think or believe write or espouse. You don't get to do that for the same reason ISIS doesn't get to throw gays off the roof. Because it is an inalienable right to be free of yours and ISIS's and anyone else's control over their thoughts and speech.
If the core of my idea is hate- if I think all Whites should be exterminated as the universities teach in thinly disguised form, then the solution is not to ban those universities, the solution is to counter those thoughts with other thoughts.
Of course, when the credit card companies start deciding who can and cannot take payments and the domain registers start deciding who can and cannot have a web site , then that's a problem that needs legislative intervention.
Hitler confiscated guns. Mao confiscated guns. Stalin and Lenin confiscated guns. They had bombs and tanks and every other big weapon but they still knew they needed to confiscate guns.
All of the above also made speech illegal. It was the first order of business. Lenin gave orders to shoot anyone who stayed home from work on Christmas because those Christian ideas were counter-revolutionary.
If any of those nations had allowed free speech, their regimes would have been short-lived. Ditto China today.
You want to silence speech you think is destructive. Try to see how narcissistic that is, what place inside yourself that is coming from. It's not a desire to protect anyone. It's a desire to control other people instead of engage with them.
You see people on this board trying to prevent this whole debate. Why is that? Because in their infantile narcissism they want to make other people shut up who disagree with them. Who does that? Five year-olds.
Those people know their intellect is too feeble and they are quite frankly too lazy to engage in debate. So they[re going to force other people to shut up, outsource their outrage to the state,.It's pathetic.
3) National Socialism was indeed 1st class collectivism and not a rhetorical disguise. The state seized control of education, industry, healthcare and the media. They implemented so called hatespeech laws just like you want to do. Sure, you think their values were hate itself (so you're different!!) but THEY didn't see it that way, so their rational was exactly the same as yours- that speech there, that is destructive. Ban it.
Have you ever gone on Gab or to the DailyStormer and engaged with these people? They make no bones about their hatred of "individualism" and "free speech". They hate those things even more than the APA hates them. They absolutely own the socialist label and they know exactly what it means . You should go and talk with them. Engage them. If you're subtle, if you're thoughtful, if you can find the space to be dispassionate, you'll see your own ideas coming out of their mouths.
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“Because in their infantile narcissism they want to make other people shut up who disagree with them. Who does that? Five year-olds.”
Top notch projection.
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Yeah I read the rest of your post. Loved the Breitbart comment not because I read it but because it encapsulates your overarching irrationality. You don't care WHAT an argument has in its favor , you only care WHERE the argument is from or WHO makes the argument. You're argument by authority, to your very core. Some sources have "true facts" and some have only "false facts".
Fact. the Swedish govt had a huge backlash and had to tighten its immigration policies because of it. Consult your favorite source.
https://dailycaller.com/2018/09/10/swedish-pushback-on-refugees-parliament/
The fact is the elite leaders of Sweden who will never have to physically suffer the consequences of their narcissistic fantasies about them being a "humanitarian superpower" are ripping their country apart , getting their women raped and bankrupting their vaunted welfare system. No! You can't have a welfare state and open borders.It's simple math.
As to the clamp down on free speech in these nations, that pretty much means there is no democracy since democracy requires people be able to say and think what they want in order to make informed decisions.
The fact is these "democracies" , like France and Sweden and Britain are DINO Democracies in Name Only. They don't have freedom, they have a short list of policies which are chosen for them to select from and jail for anyone who starts talking about any other policy.
.
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Its people like you who rip countries apart. because your lack of rationality leads you to violence.
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Not at all, I'm a realist and if you can't present verifiable facts you are not citing facts. Your OP used language that was almost borrowed from extreme right-wing sites, like Breitbart which only presents "truth" when it fits their agenda.
It's not that simple but some push that idea because it fits their narrative. There where multiple reasons why the tightening of immigration policies took place. Sweden had their party Sverige Demokraterna (somewhat like UKIP) who used the refugee crisis in their rhetoric to lure people to vote for them.
Many countries in Europe started funneling the refugees (because they couldn't be arsed to fulfill their obligation they took on when they joined the EU) to Sweden which had to prompt a change in immigration. Also, the administrative side for immigration wasn't designed to handle the amount of people coming to Sweden plus the plan for the integration of people granted immigration status lagged behind.
AFAIK Sweden isn't ripping apart but that's also a narrative pushed by right-wingers. And I see you are parroting another right-wing myth, the one about rape in Sweden. Perhaps you don't know that laws differ from country to country what constitutes rape, and the law in Sweden has a VERY broad definition of rape. And Sweden never had open borders, just very inclusive immigration rules.
Finally, the immigration to Sweden actually stimulated the economy to grow, and according a report from Credit Suisse the effect of immigration is a positive factor economically speaking, see https://www.credit-suisse.com/corporate/en/articles/news-and-expertise/can-migrant-boost-european-gr owth-201510.html
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Thank you for making a thoughtful contribution .
You said:
That is true and is the reason Julian Assange called Sweden the Saudi Arabia of feminism. But it is not true that Sweden's broad sexual assault definition accounts for the Sweden being the rape capital of the EU. This does:
The correlation in all EU nations between recent Muslim immigration-
(in which I am NOT in any way including ancient populations of established, peaceful Muslim residents)
-and rape is startling and has nothing to do with Swedens fascist, man-hating definition fo sexual assualt:
https://dcdirtylaundry.com/muslim-migration-and-rape-statistics-in-europe/
Of course if Breitbart says it, even if it takes it from Sweden's own reports, it still must be a lie because everything that is posted on Breitbart must be a lie because Orange Man Bad.
Despite that, it's hard to find a alternative, charitable reading of this well sourced article:
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2017/01/11/official-data-sexual-assault-70-per-cent-sweden /
And it's not just Breitbart that has hard facts to make the correlation:
http://thefederalist.com/2017/03/01/yes-violent-crime-spiked-sweden-since-open-immigrat ion/
and Swedes themselves:
https://www.savemysweden.com/swedenstan-assault-violence-muslim-immigrants/
and Europe itself:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/sweden-and-denmark-have-highest-number-of-se xual-assaults-in-europe-a6800901.html
The same sick Left that insists that America is a "rape culture" and also asserts that "hate speech" leads inexonerably to violence against women and minorities and must thereforebe silenced by men with guns also, apparently with their same mouths, deny that any part of Islam directly condones very literal rape, and that adherents of fundamentalist Islam agree with this and therefore feel justified in raping "infidels", despite the fact that it does and they do:
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2016/08/sweden-40-sexual-assaults-at-music-festival-all-by-muslim-mig rants
and si willing to declare that telling the hard truth about this is a hate crime:
https://barenakedislam.com/2019/01/02/finland-tone-deaf-prime-minister-claims-that-criticism- of-muslim-migrant-rape-gangs-preying-on-small-children-is-considered-hate-speech/
This isn't about Breitart distorting reality using false narratives to generate a kind of red meat for it's racist, intolerant readers. THAT is itself a false narrative, generated by Leftists as red meat for their hate-filled , low -information readers.
It's about Swedes themselves desperate to get a truth out which has been systematically covered up across the EU:
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/01/mass_sexual_assault_by_muslims_covered_up_in_sweden _for_admitted_political_reasonpolitical.html
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/01/sex-crim es-across-germany-the-coverup-unravels.php
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/01/mass-sexua l-assault-covered-up-in-sweden-too.php
out to anyone who will listen:
https://www.savemysweden.com/category/muslims-rape/
But it's not just about the raw statisitics whioch are incontrivertable and anyway bad enough. It's about the girls and their stories:
https://www.savemysweden.com/schoolgirl-gang-raped-by-muslim-asylum-seekers-in-munich/
http s://www.savemysweden.com/pakistan-hangs-man-raped-murdered-a-six-year-old-girl/
https://www.savemysw eden.com/french-police-investigate-muslim-gang-rape-videos-aired-on-snapchat/
https://www.savemyswed en.com/malmo-seven-arab-migrant-detained-for-drugging-and-gang-raping-woman-for-10-hours/
https://ww w.savemysweden.com/arab-muslim-syria-raped-13-year-old-girl-outside-laholm-library/
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Ivan, is Vlad
You forget to put #walkaway tag on your post
Do not forget next time
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Long time reader, rare poster, not your guy.
Lomk at yourself. If two people unk own to each other both disagree with you, all you can think is sockpuppet.
That guy again! He's everywhere! He's everywhere!
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I’m sorry/not sorry that your bullshit sounds like the people who are paid to post bullshit. It does seem that the problem is that you sound like a Russian troll, Ivan.
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The 2009 bailouts showed that "capitalists" were hypocrites.
If you want law of the jungle, where X number of people will simply DIE (or starve), capitalism works, but only macroeconomically. We can have tremendous growth even if 2 percent of the population died every year. That doesn't mean life for the typical American would be worth living. Also if you deny the old, sick, and poor their basic survival, you are threatening the healthy workers with this fate the moment they are no longer of use to the capitalist state, and that's Animal Farm territory.
If you want to let someone be homeless and run up six-figure ER bills that go to the taxpayers, that's not very efficient. A true capitalist would say let them die on the street. Is that what you're proposing? If not, a stitch in time saves nine. The other problem with capitalism is that it puts survival resources in the hands of individuals who too often use that power tyrannically. Capitalism only works if everyone plays fair, and that is certainly not the case. Communism fails for the same reason (it works in theory but not in practice).
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Animal Farm was Orwells indictment of Communism. Marx declared Socialism was just a stage on the way to Communism . He was right.
No one wants 2 percent or any percent of people to suffer at all. But that is not the question, The question is what should we do to minimize suffering now and in the long term.
The answer is non crony capitalism, says history.
Look at China under central planning with Mao and look at it now. 60 million people dead under Mao"s Great Leap Forward and Five Year Plans. Literally 4 times that number lifted out of subsistance farming in the 25 years since we gave China MFN status.
Sure there is crony capitalism in China and pollution too , but even with that it"s reduced human suffering there in a way and to an extent no one thought possible.
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Know what a good start to driving down cost of hospitalization is? Make them post their prices. That's it. Industries which compete on price bring prices down.
That"s what Trump is doing - look it up.
OTOH Obama tried to force insurance to offer plans that met his genius experts' minimal qualification. How did that work out?
People lost their healthcare which they were happy with and could not afford the new plans. They elected to pay the penalty instead.
Just let the market operate and prices go down and value goes up. Healthcare like student loans is in regulatory capture with predictable results.
Too big a topic to take on via my phone interface but suffice it to say that there are reforms which would work but none of them involve the govt taxing people to pay for an industry it controls.
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Thing is, that's not always true -- healthcare suffers from paradoxical competition effects that are linked to Baumol's cost disease, where the inability to compete on productivity gains (which can be passed on to consumers as lower prices) leads to competition on non-price factors (such as selection of services, access to advanced technology, and the likes) that have the effect of driving prices upward to pay for this all, atop the pernicious effects of the cost disease itself.
Still, getting some sunlight shined on the notoriously byzantine world of medical billing is a net social good. We definitely could use better data on this problem!
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"One is a tendency to become enraged at disparate results between individuals."
Only when those results are achieved by cheating, as in the college admissions scandal, Madoff, Wall Street before the bailouts, and all the other corruption we have.
You can't have it both ways, arguing for a system which relies on meritocracy and then dismissing as "bitter" anyone who gets screwed by that system. Capitalism is supposed to serve us, not the other way around.
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Strawman. I never dismissed anyone as bitter. I said and now am explicitly saying, that govt. does not and cannot create a command economy because no entity has the information needed to achieve that feat nor could they acquire it.
When some people say socialist they mean high tax nation. That is wrong.When socialism nationalizes an industry like healthcare, then that IS socialism.
Student loans are literal debt slavery which only serve to destroy the family-starting years of those so enslaved and fund, again through literal slavery, the woke Marxist professors to whom the slaves are indebted and the institutions who pay them. They are literally slave owners. That is all the govt meddling in the market and causing inflation funded by debt slavery. If you like student loans, you"ll love AOC and Socialism.
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Everything you cite is criminal behavior. Do you think people espousing capitalism are FOR any of that?
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…yes.
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Re: Womp womp
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We have consistently eschewed an expansive reading of the statute that would render unlawful conduct “magically . . . lawful when [conducted] online,” and therefore “giv[ing] online businesses an unfair advantage over their real-world counterparts.”
This bit is a complete strawman. Maybe even on fire. Who claimed unlawful conduct isn't unlawful? If your problem is with your residents cum landlords, deal with them. Doesn't matter if they post their ads on the moon, or in sky-writing. (Except where sky-crime is legal.)
Here's a thought: Why doesn't the city just check the damn listings, and fine the non-compliant? What a bunch of morons. That's 1) revenue enhancement, and 2) a direct punishment and inducement not to violate the ordinance, and it is their residents performing the violations.
I get that, as a service (payment transaction) provider, things are a little different, but in that case, the larger difference is that the potential transaction is out in the open where the city can see (and whinge) about it, rather than the millions of off the books transactions they don't bother with.
Guess what? Santa Monica now has an underground for short term rentals. Good job. Have fun taxing and regulating people letting "friends" crash at their place, or strangers couch-surfing for "free". Derp.
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Exactly. 180 degrees from intended outcome.
The reason they want gun control is because everytime a liberal goes target shooting, they end up shooting themselves.
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And I guess it has zero relevance to the fact that children are getting shot and killed in droves...
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Define "droves" . Now compare that number to the number of their own people governments have murdered after they disarmed them.
Yeah, it's like that. The reason for the 2nd amendment is so the government can't act tyrannically towards you or me. You should appreciate that facct.
Know how may gun stores there are in Mexico? One- the Directorate of Arms and Munitions Sales. Know how hard it is to own a gun in Mexico? Hard- very very very very very hard. Know how many people die in Mexico from guns? 10,000 give or take. Know why? Gun control.
As soon as you disarm honest people, you leave the guns to the criminals. Ask the Jews in the Ukraine about how that work exactly- those are the pictures you've seen of people being stripped naked and piled up like cord wood in mass graves.
Know what country has an automatic weapon in nearly every house? Switzerland where males aged 18-34 have to join the army and are expected to keep their fully automatic weapon at home, in the closet.
They have about as many gun deaths as Finland.
Gun deaths in America are largely confined to certain criminal populations who use them in the drug wars. That's a fact. Yes there are standout cases where a shooter shoots up a church school etc. The solution ot that is to arm more people and take them down sooner.
Leaving yourself and your wife unarmed just creates a law of the jungle environment where, at best, the biggest person does what they want when they want to whom they want and at worst leads to Mexico where good people are unarmed and the cartels won everything including the police .
Counter-intuitive thinking is not a liberal's strong suit.
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America does not need more people to think they’re The Punisher.
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Re:
Except no one does do that. No one walks around thinking they're the punisher, especially conservatives from the "flyover states. If we subtract away homicides and gun deaths which are committed in blue state and their cities by minorities, the "high rate of gun death" just evaporates and we're shown to be an incredibly peaceful people, which we are.
The fact is the left could give a damn about gun deaths . Fentynal and cars crashes BOTH kill more people than guns. Just like they don't care if women get raped en masse coming over the border illegally. They never talk about it or worry about it but PH! did Kevin Spacey make a hard pass at a grown man?????
They only want to disarm the country and load it up with democrat voters -illegal , legal, whatever who cares- so they can have uncontested power.
They used to be a party. I used to belong to them. They're diseased and psychotic and need to be dealt with as such. If 1/3 of this nation goes insane then that's what happened and we'll deal with it. What's not going to happen, ever , is you're not going to take away quite, law abiding American's citizen's guns because of the behavior of criminals and you're not going to roll back one inch of the 1st amendment either.
Ever.
Ever.
Did Trump surprise you in 2018? Maybe you should stop reading huffpo and CNN and the MSM and start reading Breitbart because, frankly, one of those got it right and the rest of them are knowing deliberate calculating liars about every single topic they write about.
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Hi! Ostensible leftist here.
My dream is to see the Second Amendment repealed and to have both guns and ammunition regulated with more force and conditions than we regulate alcohol and tobacco. Failing that, I could live with more (and more stringent) regulations on who can legally own guns and how many guns they can legally own. (Ammo regulations would be nice, too.) America has a serious issue with guns; while the root of gun violence is not guns themselves, guns make it that much easier to commit that violence — especially the guns seemingly designed for mass murder.
People should have access to the privilege of owning a gun. But owning one should not be a goddamn human right.
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Because the modern world, you know, the way we live today, we moderns, are beyond history and the 100 million dead citizens of those past govts, that could never happen again.
Whew.
Mexico is not a counter example to your reasoning because why again?
Switzerland is not a counter example to your reasoning because why?
Britain's refusal to honor the outcome of their own referendum , the expressed will of their own disarmed people is not a tell.
Leftists don't argue on the evidence, they argue to support their genetically determined need to control other people and dominate them, just like any other great ape species
Since that's not a great look, they dress it up as "concern for the masses" .
You want the guns confiscated ostensibly to "save innocent lives", but hack babies out of wombs and write laws that expressly say no medical reason need be given, even after the baby's been born.
Subtract away criminals killing each other in tightly defined areas and you are left with a smattering of deaths in endlessly publicized outlier shootings.
Meanwhile, you refuse to take border control seriously and drugs and the concomitant criminal activity pour in from the south, killing many times the people guns do.
Leftists completely lack the ability to have insight into their own base motivations. Their tell to others is the irrationality of their arguments.
We are, finally a rational species, so the social outcome is this- like any other adolescent talking loudly and shallowly about things they obviously have no real world experience with, the silent majority of adults see through them without effort, and the liberals have no idea that's happening.
You want power over people you despise. That's the only thing you want. We all know that, it's transparently true.
It's never going to happen.
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Go back and read the comment I posted. Not once — not a single gotdamn time — will you find the words grab, take, or confiscate in it. If anything, I believe a person who legally owns a gun should have it taken from them by the proper authorities for one of only two reasons: They are provably irresponsible with the storage and usage of their gun, or they are provably a threat to themselves or others.
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Re:
You specifically said you want to repeal the 2nd Amendment. So the govt. picks and chooses who has weapons to oppose govt tyranny.
Like I said, when reality is evenslightly counter-intuitive, leftists can't process it.
BTW, you're attempting to steer the discussion away from the substantive, evidence based points I made, both historical and contemporary, none of which you addressed (and of which I have many more) and into one of the form: "you said I said I said something I didn't say!".
An easily spotted diversionary rhetorical trick.
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The government kinda already did. Last time I checked, ordinary people cannot buy and operate their own stealth bombers and surface-to-air missiles.
But more to the point: I am for repealing the Second Amendment because ownership of a gun should be treated not as a guaranteed human right, but a privilege. People should need to prove themselves worthy of the privilege by passing exhaustive background checks, extensive firearms training, and annual testing — and they should have that privilege revoked if they fail at any time. The legal availability of all kinds of guns should be regulated as well, although handguns should face (comparatively) looser regulations in that regard than, say, an AR-15.
A gun is a tool with a single violent purpose. That purpose alone is reason enough to regulate the sale and possession of guns.
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Great. And I want to fornid Marxist and Leftists from being employed in the public sector, and I want to test you through extensive psychological and background checks to see if you qualify as a Marxist or leftist , using criteria I will of course define. Sure, we'll have to roll back some amendments but how many people have leftists and socialists killed last century. 100 million. Reason enough .
Btw anyone who is too far left. As judged from their online activity or what other people report to me they say or did, will also have their right to vote in any election removed because at the rate at which people murder people using guns in America, it would take 100,000 years -literally- to catch up to the murders collectivists commited last century "for the People".
You may not like my new regime, but I know better than you, so too bad.
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So you are a fascist. Great, now we know...
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This is exactly why you need to be stopped.
All little dictators want to clear away the pesky, unenlightened laws in their way because they think once those laws are gone, they and people will always be in charge.
That is every despots fantasy.
We have to save you from a future in which you and your kind are put up against a wall and shot because you and your kind deconstructed the system which stopped you and your kind from coming to power.
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The actual debate is about section 230 until you walked up and what the thread bro. So take your little strawman and your right wing ammosexual/ruskie troll propaganda and kindy fuck off.
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I'm not your bro, and I don't care what you think about a conversation which does not include you.
So go back to your bong, subhuman dirtbag.
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Re: One little triggered snowflake
Hey bro you’re the one who showed up off topic here. I didn’t walk into your work and smack the dick outta your mouth.
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Re: Re: One little triggered snowflake
Ahhh I love it when the left goes homophobic. It's like when they go anti-semetic. The mask just drops away.
Really, I feel for you snowflake, the agony of having to watch free people debate in anger what they want to debate without you being able to stop them.
The real world. It's not like college , is it snowflake?
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When you call someone a "snowflake", you are quoting Fight Club, a satire written by a gay man about how male fragility causes men to destroy themselves, resent society, and become radicalized. Tyler Durden is not a hero, but a personification of the main character’s mental illness; his "snowflake" speech is both a mockery and an example of how fascists use dehumanizing language to garner loyalty from insecure people.
In other words: If you use "snowflake" as an insult, you are quoting a domestic terrorist who blows up skyscrapers because he is insecure about how good he is in bed.
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Re:
Except we all know that snowflake is used to describe leftists who get bent out of shape by ordinary human intercourse. That is it's actual usage. You know it I know it and everyone reading this knows it.
So BZZZT you have no point.
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“Except we all know that snowflake is used to describe leftists who get bent out of shape by ordinary human intercourse”
Replace leftist with triggered right wing crybaby and you might have a point. Everyone but you knows it bro.
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Re:
Here's what hatew speech laws lead directly to:. Remember, this is the UK. Sweden et.al. are worse.
https://dailycaller.com/2017/07/27/uk-police-force-threatens-to-charge-twitter-users-who-mock ed-it/
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/arrests-for-offensive-facebook-and-twitter-posts-soar-i n-london-a7064246.html
https://www.businessinsider.com/in-britain-police-arrest-twitter-and-facebook -users-if-they-make-anti-muslim-statements-2013-5
The last one was exactly the reason why Muslim rape gangs were able to rape thousands of under age girls across the UK for decades- because the UK has terrified it's population from criticizing Muslims in any way shape or form upon pain of jail
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerscruton/2014/08/30/why-did-british-police-ignore-pakistani-gangs- raping-rotherham-children-political-correctness/#48e57fa5754a
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/ crime/grooming-gangs-uk-britain-newcastle-serious-case-review-operation-sanctuary-shelter-muslim-asi an-a8225106.html
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2018/03/uk-police-told-victim-of-muslim-rape-gang-not-to -mention-the-ethnicity-of-her-rapists
https://gellerreport.com/2018/11/rape-sikh-nothing.html/
https ://bigleaguepolitics.com/as-muslim-rape-gangs-ransack-britain-police-focus-on-activists-warning-of-i slamification/
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2018/02/uk-muslim-rape-gang-repeated-raped-teen-girl-over- two-year-period-police-did-nothing
http://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/world/2017/august/politically-correct -uk-cops-fail-to-stop-rape-gangs.
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Re: Right on schedule
Daww. You ammosexual talking points aren’t working better switch to some racist fear-mongering.
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Re: Mane head back to your safe space before you tear up again
You really need to work on your insult game bro. Of course since all you have is badly recycled right wing nut job propaganda. I don’t hold out much for an actual debate, much less an original thought.
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Re: Re: Mane head back to your safe space before you tear up aga
Plus... you don't like me!!!! please. Tell us more,. We're riveted in place by your contribution .
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Re: Re: Re: Mane head back to your safe space before you tear up
Noh bro, I don’t care about you. I just like triggering right wing snowflakes.
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Go ahead and rip the Constitution apart Amendment by Amendment. Repeal the 2nd. Make so called "hatespeech" laws override the first. go ahead. Overturn the Electoral College. Go ahead. See how that works out for you. Attack the only thing keeping you safe.
Because while Antifa may think it owns Portland and California AG Becerra may have fast tracked Calimexico into existence with its associated, open, rampant disregard for the rule of law , and the NY legislature may have made baby murder "legal" retroactively overturned the statue of limitations for civil sexual assault cases believe me, leftists aren't the only ones who can think of creative new laws which are Constitutionally prohibited at this point in time.
Go ahead- unleash us. Unleash our creative law-making ability. Think that's the special provenance of the Left and Yale and Harvard grads? Let's find out. Because if the Constitution falls then you know what? The Constitution fell and believe me the second time, we don't make the same mistakes we made the first time which led to its failure, and yes, we know what those as-yet-potential mistakes were.
We're doing what we have always done. Watching and waiting. Watching the left have homicidal tantrums over an election they lost, watching the mask drop away and their spitting hissing, rioting, assaultive, anti-science, anti-rational apoplectic anarchistic ids of the left pour gasoline over our civilization and then start desperately trying to light a match.
We're not there yet. i hope we never get there. But if Trump surprised you in 2018, you have no idea what's going on silently under the surface.
We , and not you, are genuinely concerned with genocidal regimes coming to power and we've studied them, read about the preconditions for genocide, the warning signs, the rhetoric, the systematic othering, the propaganda, the moral absolutism, the dehumanization and depiction of us as subhuman deplorables, the attempts to overturn society's norms and laws in service of "trans kids rights" and anything else the left can pull out of its cesspool .
We understand where we are in history, the moment we're in .
My advice to you is back off. But people like you don't ever back off, do you?You hear that as a challenge, don't you? You never stop; you always need to be stopped. That's just who you are.
The left coast and the MSM think they've found their jackbooted shock troops in antifa and their Jew hating radical leaders in Omar and Tlaib and Ellison and they're all set to deconstruct this nation via 16 year-olds voting (for Democrats) and illegals voting (for Democrats) and Open Borders changing the demographics (to Democrat) and defying the expressed will of their own states voters by their electors casting their vote for whoever the "other" states voted for.
The only thing keeping you safe is the Constitution. I wouldn't go looking to wound it.
What part of "Never Again" don't you understand?
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Re:
Cool story bro. Sorry/not sorry you are old and irrelevant. Remember bro liberals own guns too. Not that you would have the actual balls required to say that hose plops to someones face.
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Sorry to inform you sir, this isn’t breitbart, And while cute, in a moody teenagers journal kind of way. Your little manifesto is going to over like jellied dog puke at this particular website.
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A bona fide right-wing nut. It's almost like reading any of the manifestos left by some of the mass-murders' shooting up random people because "reasons".
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1200 kids where killed last year in the USA due to gun-violence, that would constitute "droves of kids" in my book.
And what relevance has that to kids getting shot? Or sane gun-control? ZERO relevance. Also, please list which governments disarmed their citizens and then murdered them. It's you trying to prove a point, perhaps backing it up with some facts.
Uhm, you do know most of the guns in Mexico actually comes from the US?
https://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-mexico-guns-20180524-story.html
Finland has more guns per capita than Switzerland (27.5% vs 24.5% of citizens). Gun-related homicide in Switzerland is 0.21 per 100,000 inhabitants, Finland 0.32. Which also proves my point, gun control works since EVERYONE of those automatic weapons that's in a Swiss house are only available AFTER you gone through your military duty tour successfully.
No, that's factually wrong. The US has 12 gun deaths per 100000 whereof 4.5 are homicides.
Which speaks more of political failure than gun control, because no amount of guns can fix the shit-show that's going on in Mexico.
And thinking at all seems to be something you don't do, you just reacted and spewed forth something that's barely relevant to what I wrote while believing I'm an liberal that can't think. Jumping to conclusions without thinking is usually the forte of stupid people.
Perhaps if you engaged your brain and re-read my post you would realize I never said anything about disarming everyone, I just pointed out your dishonesty.
And just to explain it to you in words so you perhaps can understand it since it just whooshed passed you the first time, gun-control saves live because not everyone is fit to own a gun - no matter their political affiliation.
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Re:
Homeowners risk incredible liability if they do that, so that's doubtful.
As for the rest:
We have consistently eschewed an expansive reading of the statute that would render unlawful conduct “magically . . . lawful when [conducted] online,” and therefore “giv[ing] online businesses an unfair advantage over their real-world counterparts.”
"This bit is a complete strawman. Maybe even on fire. Who claimed unlawful conduct isn't unlawful? If your problem is with your residents cum landlords, deal with them. Doesn't matter if they post their ads on the moon, or in sky-writing. (Except where sky-crime is legal.)"
Section 230 eliminates distributor liability for defamation, and just about any liability for negligence or other state-law torts, which "magically" cannot trigger a lawsuit online. Lower courts in California have detested 230 for a while, with one of them even refusing to invoke it, but they wound up reversed by a Supreme Court which said it was appalled at the result but had to follow the federal law (they didn't, as they could send it to the SCOTUS for its first review).
For all the talk about 230 being "settled" law, it's NEVER been tested by the SCOTUS, and there is no equivalent in any other country. Female victims of revenge porn were harmed badly by it, as have been many businesses targeted for "reputation blackmail" or just by the disgruntled, or competitors. None of this conduct would be legal in the offline world. As the internet weaves its way into mainstream society, the "magic" that gave rise to 230 is wearing off.
Once upon a time, lots of behavior which is costing people their careers now was thought to be the norm. Same for spreading internet lies just because someone read them in a search engine.
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If I post something that defames a celebrity on Twitter without any prompting or direct aid from anyone at Twitter, for what reason should Twitter be held liable for defamation?
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Re:
None*
*so long as twitter isn't taking a percentage of your profits from making that tweet and charging you a percentage posting fee of the eventual profits from the people paying to read your tweet and a flat fee for simply letting you post the tweet in the first place.
If however Twitter is doing those things... well. It's profiting from the defamation and liable even under section 230.
And that's where AirBnB is. It's not the posting that's getting them in trouble. It's when they go to make a profit off the posting and charging for the privilege to post in the first place that's getting them in trouble and breaking their 230 immunity.
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Section 230 & Speech
Section 230 doesn't regulate speech, it regulates compliance with local laws. City of Santa Monica (and all municipalities) only need to require that Internet service providers simply check that all advertising is for legitimate products and services which are in compliance with local laws.
Advertisers should be required to submit proof that they have registered short term rental properties with appropriate government entities, and that they are paying taxes.
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Re: Section 230 & Speech
That data is already public in most cities.
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Re: Section 230 & Speech
No, it has nothing to do with local laws. It's about shielding service providers from liability for their users' actions.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
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This case will give the SCOTUS a free shot to take down Section 230 or punt the question by saying it's not a "speech" case.
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This exactly:
the basic reality that it does indeed force platforms to do exactly that: police user speech for legality in order to avoid liability arising from that speech.
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The TYPE of speech matters
Courts have long differentiated between commercial and non-commercial speech when viewing the impacts of laws and regulations. I really see no difference here. The issue clearly involves a commercial transaction. I do not see it as over reaching to require that property owners provide documentation confirming that they have in fact registered their property for use on the platforms. Indeed, the platform could easily confirm registration directly with the governmental authority.
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Re: The TYPE of speech matters
Having first figured out which of twenty thousand plus authorities that could be, and then figured out if they require registration, and if they do, do they have an online register.
It looks simple when discussing a story about a town that requires that to be done, but it gets much more complex when you have a payment to process for the first person from a random town, where you do not even know if they have any form of registration requirements.
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Re: Re: The TYPE of speech matters
But they already have figure which 'authority' is controlling to have a business in the first place. And have been doing this quite successfully for years! They have to for the purpose of state, county, and local taxes they have to assess when completing the transaction.
And it's for a piece of property in the physical world at a specific location. It's not like it's that hard for them to look up the address of the rental, especially considering the landlord already gives them that info when they post the listing in the first place! And they need that info just to make their business work so they can sort and curate listings for the end user!
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Simple solution
Very simple solution... Kill and all listings from that area. Black it out. Done.
You want to constrain us, there you go. And let people complain until the ordinance is undone.
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MEETING
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