"You just keep on with that right-wing talking point that "it's a private company" nonsense"
Please, I think you mean "first amendment talking point".
"public utility of all social media"
ALL social media? What would "public utility" even mean? In the US we have "telecommunication common carriers for hire" in 47 USC, where carriers get certain legal protections in agreeing to accept any customer able to pay for their services. All the social media companies I know don't require subscription payments from their customers. Do we convert them all into user-paid services? I'm wondering how this business model works.
An HOA is not typically a state actor, bound by the first amendment. Some states do provide some speech-like protections for political signs--for instance, here in Texas, HOAs must allow you at least a single political sign around the time of elections: https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/EL/htm/EL.259.htm
Likewise, during the Bush admin, Congress passed a federal law that blocks HOAs and condominiums restricting the display of the US flag.
But in general, clauses restricting speech are allowed and are enforceable.
The license to remove content is the First Amendment. Section 230's (c)(2) just explicitly declares publisher liability isn't changed when content is removed for basically any reason. This confuses a lot of people. It's questionable whether it's even needed, because (c)(1) is so strongly worded about 3rd party content.
If (c)(2) were deleted entirely from the law, it would introduce no cause of action for people whose content is removed. It was added as a backup to the NY state decision Stratton Oakmont v Prodigy, that because Prodigy had a naughty words filter and a policy on posting, plus board administrators that enforced the latter, it made Prodigy a publisher. Say that situation is added: it still gives you absolutely zero rights to sue if your post is deleted. It gives you less than zero standing. The whole thing about the court case was Prodigy didn't censor the content.
'Section 230 requires all moderation to be in "good faith"'
And "in good faith" is a famously vague term, but there is a vast amount of common and case law, for centuries, on what it means in context of contract law, where the term most frequently appears--at its root, not twisting the contract wording by one party to give themselves an unfair advantage. Here, the terms of service act as a contract, and the amount of "bad faith" re-interpretation of rules that were written by teams of well-paid lawyers, that typically allow the platform the complete right to remove any content at will, is asymptotic to 0.
"In good faith" occurs in a LOT of statutory law. A search restricted to the US code at law.cornell.edu/uscode shows just shy of 1000 hits. You're not going to be able to create some off-the-wall bullshit interpretation of the phrase and get any court to agree with you.
It might be worth adding a section for when someone says "tech gets immunity that no other industry gets", which I know you've covered before. Bookstores, newspapers publishing wire service stories, radio and television for content created elsewhere--even if not a blanket grant of freedom of liability, decreased liability is quite similar to the goals of 230.
"As I have said from the day we launched, this firm is the legal industry equivalent of the Navy's SEAL Team 6 or the Army's 75th Ranger Regiment," said Pierce"
He's trained in gorilla lawfare, and is the top griper in the entire US ABA.
"As far as champagne, the US does not protect that Term. That is why wineries in the santa rosa and napa regions can sell their sparkling wines as champagne. The EU regulates the term champagne as region specific, but the US does not regulate those terms."
The US does regulate it since the mid 2000s (this was following years of demands from France), but grandfathered in companies that had previously used the term, which is a lot. Unless something has changed recently, no new wine makers get to call their products "champagne".
Trademark, as mentioned. And it wasn't simply one company for many years. It was just one two men, Edward Packard and R.A. Montgomery. It's been a trademark since the late 70s. There were a lot of competitors in the early 80s, when the brand was well-known and a big money maker, but they all used different series names, because, you know, trademark. Crossroads Adventures was one, which mostly licensed SF worlds of established authors like Zelazny and McCaffrey. TSR did "Endless Quests". There were others that I can't remember.
Right now DNSSEC is a bit of a failed protocol. The key size requires a fallback to TCP, and so many of the places I've worked or seen don't allow tcp over 53. For years, you'd see it recommended in security best practices, usually because the only traffic that would go over tcp on 53 would be zone transfers. And of course, DNSSEC is only designed to protect integrity, not confidentiality.
DNSSEC makes a lot more sense in DNS over https than it does in the DNS protocol.
Ah, yeah I wasn't thinking at all of peer to peer filesharing, but FTP is a dying protocol, and it deserves to die. Debian shut down their FTP servers a couple years ago, for instance. It is an annoying, horrible protocol because of the separation of data and control channels into separate connections. It's always been hard, because of that, to make it work properly with firewalls, natting, and access lists. It becomes a really serious problem if you encrypt the control plane, because you're left leaving blocks of ports wide-open, or limiting the numbers of connections. Seriously, I've been cursing FTP for decades now.
For downloading, it provides no advantages over http downloads, and for uploads, that functionality has been largely replaced by http uploads, dropbox type services, or to a lesser degree for specialized apps, webdav.
It's tangential, but this could make an enormous leap to an all-http Internet--that is, traffic traversing from AS to AS--that is nothing except http. And in a few years with http/3, perhaps nothing but UDP.
I'm sure other protocols will continue to exist inside individual AS's for a long time (though, http/2 is replacing diameter in the 5G packet core).
The Internet really only bears a very superficial resemblance to what it was 30 years ago.
That doesn't mean it's going to ever make it to trial or judgment. For that, you need to present a valid claim--and that must be consistent with the 1st amendment. Since the first amendment protects opinions, the court, a state actor, cannot impose a liability on you for that opinion. Here, no valid claim was found to have been presented, so the case was tossed.
The SPLC still had to spend a fair amount of money on lawyers to argue that. Fortunately, they had the funds to do so. Not everyone does. A proper federal anti-SLAPP law would give procedural advantages to everyone sued when it's clear on its face there is no claim.
Re: Headline
Or get Nick Lutsko to write the theme song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09Nan-uARF4
Re: Pity
"You just keep on with that right-wing talking point that "it's a private company" nonsense"
Please, I think you mean "first amendment talking point".
"public utility of all social media"
ALL social media? What would "public utility" even mean? In the US we have "telecommunication common carriers for hire" in 47 USC, where carriers get certain legal protections in agreeing to accept any customer able to pay for their services. All the social media companies I know don't require subscription payments from their customers. Do we convert them all into user-paid services? I'm wondering how this business model works.
Re: Fixed that for you
Relevant: https://reductress.com/post/wow-this-woman-found-out-she-was-a-robot-by-failing-a-captcha-11-times/
Re: Re:
An HOA is not typically a state actor, bound by the first amendment. Some states do provide some speech-like protections for political signs--for instance, here in Texas, HOAs must allow you at least a single political sign around the time of elections: https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/EL/htm/EL.259.htm
Likewise, during the Bush admin, Congress passed a federal law that blocks HOAs and condominiums restricting the display of the US flag.
But in general, clauses restricting speech are allowed and are enforceable.
Re:
The license to remove content is the First Amendment. Section 230's (c)(2) just explicitly declares publisher liability isn't changed when content is removed for basically any reason. This confuses a lot of people. It's questionable whether it's even needed, because (c)(1) is so strongly worded about 3rd party content.
If (c)(2) were deleted entirely from the law, it would introduce no cause of action for people whose content is removed. It was added as a backup to the NY state decision Stratton Oakmont v Prodigy, that because Prodigy had a naughty words filter and a policy on posting, plus board administrators that enforced the latter, it made Prodigy a publisher. Say that situation is added: it still gives you absolutely zero rights to sue if your post is deleted. It gives you less than zero standing. The whole thing about the court case was Prodigy didn't censor the content.
Re: Reform
'Section 230 requires all moderation to be in "good faith"'
And "in good faith" is a famously vague term, but there is a vast amount of common and case law, for centuries, on what it means in context of contract law, where the term most frequently appears--at its root, not twisting the contract wording by one party to give themselves an unfair advantage. Here, the terms of service act as a contract, and the amount of "bad faith" re-interpretation of rules that were written by teams of well-paid lawyers, that typically allow the platform the complete right to remove any content at will, is asymptotic to 0.
"In good faith" occurs in a LOT of statutory law. A search restricted to the US code at law.cornell.edu/uscode shows just shy of 1000 hits. You're not going to be able to create some off-the-wall bullshit interpretation of the phrase and get any court to agree with you.
Very nice summary!
It might be worth adding a section for when someone says "tech gets immunity that no other industry gets", which I know you've covered before. Bookstores, newspapers publishing wire service stories, radio and television for content created elsewhere--even if not a blanket grant of freedom of liability, decreased liability is quite similar to the goals of 230.
Re:
Different lawsuit. That one is yet to be summarily dismissed.
This one was about Google's temporary suspension of her account last year.
(untitled comment)
"As I have said from the day we launched, this firm is the legal industry equivalent of the Navy's SEAL Team 6 or the Army's 75th Ranger Regiment," said Pierce"
He's trained in gorilla lawfare, and is the top griper in the entire US ABA.
Re: Re: Yes, but...
"As far as champagne, the US does not protect that Term. That is why wineries in the santa rosa and napa regions can sell their sparkling wines as champagne. The EU regulates the term champagne as region specific, but the US does not regulate those terms."
The US does regulate it since the mid 2000s (this was following years of demands from France), but grandfathered in companies that had previously used the term, which is a lot. Unless something has changed recently, no new wine makers get to call their products "champagne".
Re:
Trademark, as mentioned. And it wasn't simply one company for many years. It was just one two men, Edward Packard and R.A. Montgomery. It's been a trademark since the late 70s. There were a lot of competitors in the early 80s, when the brand was well-known and a big money maker, but they all used different series names, because, you know, trademark. Crossroads Adventures was one, which mostly licensed SF worlds of established authors like Zelazny and McCaffrey. TSR did "Endless Quests". There were others that I can't remember.
(untitled comment)
"The rental car was only doing 60 mph in a 70-mph speed zone"
That crime is far worse than carrying 82 lbs of marijuana. If you're not passing someone, GET OUT OF THE DAMN PASSING LANE!!
The NYT does have someone that understands 230
Just let Sarah Jeong proof any article that even mentions 230, before it's published.
She gets it right: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/opinion/section-230-political-neutrality.html
Re: Re: Re: Weak Sauce
Right now DNSSEC is a bit of a failed protocol. The key size requires a fallback to TCP, and so many of the places I've worked or seen don't allow tcp over 53. For years, you'd see it recommended in security best practices, usually because the only traffic that would go over tcp on 53 would be zone transfers. And of course, DNSSEC is only designed to protect integrity, not confidentiality.
DNSSEC makes a lot more sense in DNS over https than it does in the DNS protocol.
Re: Re: An internet of only http?
Ah, yeah I wasn't thinking at all of peer to peer filesharing, but FTP is a dying protocol, and it deserves to die. Debian shut down their FTP servers a couple years ago, for instance. It is an annoying, horrible protocol because of the separation of data and control channels into separate connections. It's always been hard, because of that, to make it work properly with firewalls, natting, and access lists. It becomes a really serious problem if you encrypt the control plane, because you're left leaving blocks of ports wide-open, or limiting the numbers of connections. Seriously, I've been cursing FTP for decades now.
For downloading, it provides no advantages over http downloads, and for uploads, that functionality has been largely replaced by http uploads, dropbox type services, or to a lesser degree for specialized apps, webdav.
An internet of only http?
It's tangential, but this could make an enormous leap to an all-http Internet--that is, traffic traversing from AS to AS--that is nothing except http. And in a few years with http/3, perhaps nothing but UDP.
I'm sure other protocols will continue to exist inside individual AS's for a long time (though, http/2 is replacing diameter in the 5G packet core).
The Internet really only bears a very superficial resemblance to what it was 30 years ago.
Re: 1st
You can be sued for anything.
That doesn't mean it's going to ever make it to trial or judgment. For that, you need to present a valid claim--and that must be consistent with the 1st amendment. Since the first amendment protects opinions, the court, a state actor, cannot impose a liability on you for that opinion. Here, no valid claim was found to have been presented, so the case was tossed.
The SPLC still had to spend a fair amount of money on lawyers to argue that. Fortunately, they had the funds to do so. Not everyone does. A proper federal anti-SLAPP law would give procedural advantages to everyone sued when it's clear on its face there is no claim.
The saddest part about this
I'm mainly disappointed only Stephens is being made fun of. Where's the well-warranted disdain for David Brooks??
(untitled comment)
Except Facebook is basically a public utility, like electricity. I have a constitutional right to pee on a 345 kV wire.
Re: Re: Re: "Stone" admits wishes to be RULED by corpo
See: "Where it makes sense, corporations have always been people in the US."
More comments from allengarvin >>
Techdirt has not posted any stories submitted by allengarvin.
Submit a story now.
Tools & Services
TwitterFacebook
RSS
Podcast
Research & Reports
Company
About UsAdvertising Policies
Privacy
Contact
Help & FeedbackMedia Kit
Sponsor/Advertise
Submit a Story
More
Copia InstituteInsider Shop
Support Techdirt