from Hacker News

Sunsetting Section 230 Will Hurt Internet Users, Not Big Tech

by pcvarmint on 5/20/24, 11:42 PM with 17 comments

• by hedora on 5/21/24, 5:24 AM

  If they sunset Section 230, they should also sunset the entire DMCA.

  That law was a compromise between giving copyright holders all sorts of new powers (DRM, takedown notices, etc), and allowing tech companies to create monopoly platforms (via Section 230) by making it legal() for them to centralize speech (and therefore censorship) on their platforms.

  Without the DMCA, we wouldn’t have sites like YouTube or Facebook, and I argue that’d be a good thing. Instead, people would need to self-host their videos, etc. The price of that is approaching zero, but software hasn’t made it easy enough to go those routes (and economic incentives prevent companies from investing in such things).

  Anyway, the DMCA without Section 230 will have the effect of further centralizing control over online speech. It won’t end well.

  () it was technically legal before the DMCA, but only if you were willing to take on unbounded legal liability.

• by 1vuio0pswjnm7 on 5/21/24, 2:48 AM

  "The law is not a shield for Big Tech."

  No, but it protects the public from the emergence of more "Big Tech" companies and the so-calleed "tech" companies, hoping for an "exit", that they they acquire to stay dominant in perpetuity.

  Google's lawyer argued to the US Supreme Court that Section 230 is what allowed it and other "Big Tech" companies to grow so large.

  Section 230 protects centralisation. An absence of Section 230 might help decentralisation.

• by beardog on 5/21/24, 4:22 AM

  What impact would the loss of 230 have on p2p? Would a bitcoin node operator become liable for criminal transactions people make? Would Tor nodes become even riskies than they are to run? Would participating in the torrent DHT become risky even if I only torrent Linux isos?

• by Nasrudith on 5/21/24, 2:23 PM

  It is dismaying that so many people who should know better have fallen deep for the anti-Section 230 propaganda after years of bullshit peddling. Meanwhile the whole time I thought "Who would be stupid enough to fall for it?".

• by amadeuspagel on 5/21/24, 12:26 PM

  Sunsetting Section 230 will hurt internet users and big tech.

• by o0-0o on 5/21/24, 3:31 AM

  I remember the Internet before 230, and it was fine.

• by saurik on 5/21/24, 12:08 PM

  > If Congress deletes Section 230, the pre-digital legal rules around distributing content would kick in. That law strongly discourages services from moderating or even knowing about user-generated content.

  This frankly sounds like a good thing to me. And if there is a side effect that it is no longer easy to build a forum without taking on some liability for the content--the same as any real-world offline forum would have to--that also doesn't sound like a bad thing.

  The EFF frankly has a broken, unimaginative, and even obsolete take on this issue: one which insists that the specific way we went about building centralized moderation with built-in traffic surveillance is somehow the only way any of it ever could have worked :/.

  The reality is that it isn't the late 90s anymore: we have peer-to-peer network protocols and end-to-end encryption and we now even finally have AI user agents in our toolbox... incentives that cause platforms to "avoid even knowing about user-generated content" is how you ensure everything from network neutrality to basic privacy.