Wanna Make Big Tech Monopolies Even Worse? Kill Section 230
from the this-will-make-the-problem-you-think-you're-fixing-worse dept
It’s no fun when your friends ask you to take sides in their disputes. The plans for every dinner party, wedding, and even funeral arrive at a juncture where you find yourself thinking, “Dang, if I invite her, then he won’t come.”
It’s even less fun when you’re running an online community, from a groupchat to a Mastodon server (or someday, a Bluesky server), or any other (increasingly cheap and easy) space where your friends (and their friends) can hang out online, far from the unquenchable dumpster-fires of Big Tech social media.
But there’s a circle of hell that’s infinitely worse than being asked to choose sides in a flamewar: being threatened with a lawsuit for refusing to do so (or even for complying with one side’s request over the other).
At EFF, we’ve had decades of direct experience with the, uh, heated rhetoric that attends online disputes (there’s a reason the most famous law about online arguments was coined by the very first person EFF ever hired).
That’s one of the reasons we’re such big fans of Section 230 (47 U.S.C. § 230), a much-maligned, badly misunderstood law that protects people who run online services from being dragged into legal disputes between their users.
Getting sued can profoundly disrupt your life, even if you win. Much of the time, people on the receiving end of legal threats are forced to settle because they can’t afford to defend themselves in court. There’s a whole cottage industry of legal bullies who’ll help the thin-skinned, vindictive and deep-pocketed to silence their critics.
That’s why we were so alarmed to see a bill introduced in the House Energy and Commerce Committee that would sunset Section 230 as of December 31, 2025, with no provision to protect online service providers from being conscripted into their users’ online disputes and the legal battles that arise from them.
Homely places on the internet aren’t just a curiosity anymore, nor are they merely a hangover from the Web 1.0 era.
In an age of resurgent anti-monopoly activism, small online communities, either standing on their own, or joined in loose “federations,” are the best chance we have to escape Big Tech’s relentless surveillance and clumsy, unaccountable control.
Look, running online communities is already a thankless task that can convert a generous digital host into a bitter ex-online host.
The alternatives to Big Tech come from individuals, co-ops, nonprofits and startups. These cannot exist in a world where we change the law to make people who offer a space where communities may gather vulnerable to being dragged into lawsuits between their community members.
It’s one thing to volunteer your time and resources to create a hospitable place online; it’s another thing entirely to assume an uninsurable risk that could jeopardize your life’s savings, your home, and your retirement fund. Defending against a single such case can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
That’s very bad news indeed, because a world without Section 230 will desperately need alternatives to Big Tech.
Big Tech has deep pockets, which means that even if it creates a system of hair-trigger moderation that takes down anything remotely controversial on sight, it will still attract a staggering number of legal threats.
There’s a useful analogy here to FTX, the disgraced, fraudulent cryptocurrency exchange. Like Big Tech, FTX has some genuinely aggrieved users, but FTX has also been targeted by opportunistic treasure hunters who have laid claims against the company totaling 23.6 quintillion dollars.
We know what Big Tech will do in a post-230 world, because some of us are already living in that world. Donald Trump signed SESTA-FOSTA into law in 2018. The law was billed as a narrowly targeted measure to make platforms liable for failing to intervene in cases where they were aware of human trafficking. In practice, the law has been used to indiscriminately target consensual sex work, placing sex workers in harm’s way (just as we predicted).
Without Section 230, Big Tech will shoot first, ask questions later when it comes to taking down controversial online speech (like #MeToo or Black Lives Matter). For marginalized users with little social power (again, like #MeToo or Black Lives Matter participants), Big Tech takedowns will be permanent, because Big Tech has no incentive to figure out whether it’s worth hosting their speech.
Meanwhile, for the wealthy and powerful, a post-230 world is one where dictators, war criminals, and fraudsters will have a new, powerful tool to silence their critics.
A post-230 world, in other words, is a world where Big Tech is infinitely worse for the users who already suffer most from the large platforms’ moderation failures.
But it’s also a world where it’s infinitely harder to start an alternative to Big Tech’s gigantic walled gardens.
No wonder tech billionaires support getting rid of Section 230: they understand that their overgrown, universally loathed services are vulnerable to real alternatives.
Four years ago, the Biden Administration declared that promoting competition was a whole-of-government priority (and we cheered). Getting rid of Section 230 will do the opposite: freeze the internet in its current, monopolized state, creating a world where the rule of today’s tech barons is never challenged by a more democratic, user-centric internet.
Republished from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.
Filed Under: big tech, competition, intermediary liability, section 230
Comments on “Wanna Make Big Tech Monopolies Even Worse? Kill Section 230”
Here’s a simple example of what monopolies cause and it’s ongoing, this very instant.
In Feb/2024, Unitedhealthcare was hacked. Someone dropped a ransomware app onto a PC and it ripped through everything.
Apparently, even backups were destroyed. I base this on the 14 weeks and counting and still fucked up, restoration ongoing.
This meant that a huge swath of medical providers were unable to bill insurance for care, for months and counting, in some cases. Fuck them.
This happened because United bought up a majority of the smaller entities, to “bring synergies and all that horse shit”, then ignored everything except the stock price.
What actually happened was people lost jobs, and now that all of those eggs are in a single basket, mgmt had 2 entire shits to give about any sort of fucking basic IT standards.
From what we (People other than these fuck ups) can tell, they had no EDR (these stop most/all ransomware), and no isolated, archival backups (Because fuck it, those are costs), but their stock price looked pretty, right up until the moment they fucked the entire medical billing world.
The end result was/is some medical practices closing entirely, others struggling for months while Optum worries about optics and it’s stock price. Their remediation is like watching 2 mentally challenged mops, fuck.
Stories like this will continue, because the US govt. plays a lot of lip service about monopolies, but in most instances, not only approves them, but assists with tax breaks, etc.
As Genx, I have 1 thing to say:
Re:
On the one hand, it’s true that you didn’t fight harder. On the other hand, I wonder how much of a meaningful difference you could have made, intentionally beggaring yourself while others chose to go with the flow, and all the power and resources get concentrated among those who toe the corporate line anyway. There’s a reason why Despair.com has the saying, “Play by the rules, get beat by those who don’t.”
On another note, with how many Gen Zs are doom spending, opting not to have any kids or home ownership, and just mentally checking out as a whole – you might not have to worry for much longer. They’re solving the problem by uninstalling the game and choosing not to play.
I’ve said this a million times. As someone who occasionally makes websites that sometimes has user-generated content (not just comments, sometimes this involves hosting things like stories, or add-ons for a platform, etc), if you want to make me liable for user-generated content, I’m either going to cut out anything even remotely controversial, or simply not bother. This is not out of vindictiveness; I simply have better things to do than to be spending all day moderating.
I do think some people will cheer this on from their corners, and they would be right. A less-connected world does mean fewer opportunities to harass; remove Facebook from Myanmar and there is a good argument that the situation would have developed far slower (note that the Rwandan radio station involved in spreading hate-speech was later prosecuted explicitly for its involvement). However, as the number of digital platforms dwindles and the remaining ones are sanitized in the name of “safety”, I think we will find ourselves in a far more constrained new world. Kid-friendly usually just means disabling in-game chat: no communication, no cyberbullying! As someone who was a kid during that era, I do fear that will be the approach the world now takes: no communication, no crimes, no harassment, no nothing.
If that’s not a dystopia, then I don’t know what is.
Re:
That is the FUCKING POINT.
'Not the briar patch, anything but that...'
No wonder tech billionaires support getting rid of Section 230: they understand that their overgrown, universally loathed services are vulnerable to real alternatives.
All that should be needed to utterly demolish the ‘Getting rid of 230 will reign in Big Tech’ rubbish is seeing that those same companies support the gutting of the law in question.
Unless people think that those companies are both cunning and manipulative enough to be dire threats to society itself and dumb enough to cheer on a legal change that will cripple them the fact that those companies are on board with killing 230 means they don’t believe it’s removal will be harmful to them, and if anything will be actively beneficial for them.
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Well, a significant number of conservatives think that liberals are both mollycoddled babies and society-destroying thugs—often at the same time!—so there is precedent for that level of cognitive dissonance.
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Republicans and Democrats: “That’s just Big Tech using a double bluff to play us for fools! Destroy Section 230 now!”
Oh good god not this shit again.
It isn’t tech monopolies that are the problem, it’s the monopoly the two “only choice” political parties have on our system. They’ve effectively turned our attempt at democracy into a binary farce that resembles professional wrestling more than it does anything else. The GOP have been doing a “heel turn” for a number of years now while the “democrats” prance around the ring posturing while the planet becomes less of a home and more of a cesspool every day.
Now we get to choose between two senile lame ducks, each of whom promises a return to things we never actually had in the first place, and the end result will be largely the same either way, because backwards is NOT the direction we need to be headed.
From what I can see, we’re on a fast track back to where it all started- taxation without representation. Maybe we’ll at least get a decent National Anthem out of the next go-round.
Re: Slap a patch on the dam and look for a fix later or let it burst and destroy your town
Except no, not really. Both choices are bad, you’ll likely get no arguments there, but both are not bad equally.
When ‘business as usual’ isn’t great the option that will lead to that being maintained isn’t a good one but when the alternative is more along the lines of ‘burn it to the ground and to hell with the resulting damage caused, rights trampled and/or lives lost’ then ‘business as usual’ becomes a lot more viable and palatable an option.
Re: Re:
To wit: While Biden may be a middling centrist needledick, he isn’t the kind of openly fascist asshole that Donald Trump openly promises to be if he wins a second term.
Re: Re: Re:
Including threatening to destroy the entire Constitution. Just putting that out there for those who aren’t already aware.
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Re: Re: Re:2
The left also says he is an election denier. Hilary is still going on about 2016. Now it is women’s fault for abandoning her. At least that was the excuse at the beginning of this week…
Re: Re: Re:3
Because he still denies he lost? This isn’t left vs. right, it’s verifiable reality. He claims there were huge numbers of illegal votes, but nothing has ever been presented to a court that proves such a thing. In fact, most investigations confirm that there were slightly more votes for Biden than originally counted, and the final tally was not even remotely close.
I’ve literally not heard anything from her since that election, except for a couple of press briefings unrelated to it. I’m not saying that you’re wrong, just that you’re seeing very different sources to me if you are seeing her as relevant or even visible during this election cycle.
There was a weird demographic thing where some women seemed to side with the admitted rapist Trump rather than her, but I’ve not seen that claim myself. The common wisdom seems to be that some people are getting increasingly angry over the fact that womens’ rights are being taken away and that if the popular vote wasn’t regularly ignored then the outcome of the Roe decision would have led to less negative outcomes for women. But, I’ve generally seen people complaining about the system rather than the voters, especially in recent elections where the removal of female reproductive rights appears to have inspired a lot of special election defeats for the Rs.
I’m interested as to what “triggered” you to believe that Hillary is going on about the election 8 years ago and it’s all the fault of women voters, but I suspect it’s not factually based.
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It’s a mystery to me how some Americans pretend “both sides” are the same, given their massive differences in social issues. It’s especially weird given that it’s clear to me that if you want to move “left”, you have to destroy the massive advantage that the right-wing party that almost never wins the popular vote enjoyed, which involves voting. If you want representation for the left, you first have to destroy the cult that has taken over the right.
Re: Re: '(If you ignore all the MASSIVE differences then) both sides are the same'
Best I can figure people like that are either useful idiots for the republican party who’ve fallen for their ‘there’s no point in voting because both sides are the same’ lie or actual republicans pretending to be democrats/third party in an attempt to dissuade those two groups from voting at all with the ‘both sides’ lie.
"That is not a small number! That is a BIG number!"
!!!
For those curious, here’s what that number looks like written out:
$23,600,000,000,000,000,000
To put this into perspective, that’s 236,000 times the global GDP of 2022 (about $100 trillion) and over 500,000 times the US national debt (about $34.6 trillion).
wanna make big comments even worse?
copy ‘n pasta