I n October , an unidentified user of a bulletin board hosted by an online service provider, Prodigy. The post claimed that a Long Island brokerage firm called Stratton Oakmont had committed criminal and fraudulent acts in connection with the initial public offering IPO of another company. Stratton Oakmont sued Prodigy and the unidentified poster for defamation — and won. The judge disagreed, arguing that the company was liable as the publisher of the content created by its users because it exercised editorial control over the messages on its bulletin boards in several ways and was thereby potentially liable for any and all defamatory material posted on its websites.
The case alarmed an Oregon congressman now a US senator , Ronald Wyden, who accurately perceived it as a mortal threat to the growth of the internet. It would mean that every online hosting service would need to have lawyers crawling over its site, thereby slowing exploitation of the technology to a crawl.
So with another congressman, Chris Cox, he inserted a short clause — Section — into the Communications Decency Act, which was then incorporated in the sprawling Telecommunications Act. That sentence laid the basis for everything that has followed. But what it has done is enable these platforms to scale up at an exponential rate.
Thus users can upload videos to YouTube, post reviews on Amazon and TripAdvisor or classified ads on Craigslist; and it enables Facebook and Twitter to offer social networking to millions — all without incurring legal liability for what those folks do on their platforms.
Section is thus the get-out-of-jail secret behind countless internet fortunes. And if it were to be repealed tomorrow, many of those platforms would shrivel. Not surprisingly, given the manifold abuses of surveillance capitalism and the societal damage that the tech giants are causing, people are beginning to wonder if Section ought to be revised.
