alt Hacker News>My point was that if we never had section 230 to begin with, then we would have kept the strong incentive against setting up sites revolving around centralizing speech in the first place.
Where did you get that idea? Section 230 never provided any preference or privilege to large organizations over small ones.
In fact, it did exactly the opposite for reasons I discussed. You say that without Section 230:
...lots of small sites that would find themselves in an uncomfortable
position.
How long is your aunt going to keep the completely free and volunteer site up when she has to pay lawyers $5-10K every week? And if she doesn't delete it, continue to flood the site with garbage until it's unusable, turning a knitting discussion site into 4/8chan.
All while doing nothing to stop the big boys from creating a dystopian hellhole because they have legions of lawyers on staff.
In fact, without Section 230, $BigCorp and/or other bad actors wouldn't even need to buy out their competition or wage costly efforts to destroy them, just post oceans of objectionable/off topic stuff, sue if it's taken down or wait for it to go under because its awash in garbage they posted there to make it unusable.
If we never had, or got rid of Section 230, your preferred candidate or issue advocacy group could trivially be taken down through these tactics, stifling free expression. Think fake DMCA take downs, but without recourse except through $500/hour lawyers and the courts.
Not sure where you got the idea that Section 230 ever was some sort of "giveaway" to big companies to encourage centralization. It was not, and even today it primarily protects the little guy, just as it did 30 years ago.
Do you have your mind made up and no amount of actual evidence will change it?
If not, feel free to check out the following:
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R46751#_Toc155275791
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratton_Oakmont,_Inc._v._Prod....
https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...
https://www.propublica.org/article/nsu-section-230
https://theconversation.com/law-that-built-the-internet-turn...
There's lots more of that to be found, but don't believe me. Check it out for yourself. Thanks to Section 230, among other things, you can.
You're still missing where I'm coming from.
> Without Section 230, your aunt would take down her knitting pattern discussion website/chat room/mailing list/whatever within half a day, with whoever it was posting something objectionable (or just off topic) and when your aunt deletes it, file a lawsuit claiming censorship.
I don't want "my aunt" to be running a knitting pattern discussion website! I want "my aunt" to only be publishing/hosting what she herself writes, while her discussion partners each publish/host what they themselves write. I then want all of these messages stitched together to form a cohesive presentation on each person's computer, by software that represents their interests.
There was the better part of the decade after the CDA passed that the tech community was still focused on protocols that worked this way. Section 230 immunity made sites that centralized user content feasible rather than legally radioactive. Centralized sites then took off because they were easier to develop, and investment-wise they caused Metcalfe's law power to accrue to the entity running the site rather than to an abstract protocol.
I do agree that in the current context, there is a strong path dependence here - neutering section 230 would not rewind the clock. And the present political push is from a movement that wants to censor speech even harder than corpos already currently do. I'm talking about what could have been.