The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet by Jeff Kosseff

Author:Jeff Kosseff
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2019-01-21T00:00:00+00:00

Part III

The Gradual Erosion of Section 230

During the first decade of Section 230, the section evolved from an obscure sliver of a massive telecommunications law to one of the most fundamental protections for online speech and online innovation. But Section 230 also began to draw critics. With each victory for an online platform—and a loss for a sympathetic victim—judges were raising questions about the wisdom of providing such sweeping and unprecedented protection for websites. With dozens of state and federal courts around the country adopting the Fourth Circuit’s Zeran ruling, judges largely were boxed in and stuck with an expansive interpretation of Section 230’s protection. The U.S. Supreme Court had never taken a case that required it to interpret Section 230, so Zeran effectively was the law of the land. Still, there were two key ambiguities in Section 230 that allowed judges to begin to chip away at the edges of its immunity. To understand these ambiguities, consider again the twenty-six words of Section 230: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

First, the platforms are immune only from information that is “provided by another information content provider.” If a plaintiff can show that the website, in fact, was an information content provider, then the website would not receive Section 230 immunity. Second, even if a third party was responsible for creating all the content that was the subject of the lawsuit, Section 230 prevents courts only from treating the platform as a “publisher or speaker.” If the plaintiff can demonstrate that the lawsuit stemmed from an action of the defendant other than publishing or speaking—such as breaking a promise or failing to warn of danger—then a court might decide that Section 230 did not block the lawsuit.

The following two chapters explain how courts have seized on both rationales and denied immunity to many platforms. If the first decade of Section 230 represented an expansion of the section’s reach, its second decade represented a slow but steady erosion.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.