[1vuio0pswjnm7]

"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.

[dchftcs]

230 may have helped Google grow big, but it also helps small operators from being liable for something they can't have resources to police. The fallacy in your argument is this: https://www.dhmo.org/

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

Section 230 obviously has multiple effects. It is not simply one or the other.

It can benefit small sites that produce their own content and large ones that don't at the same time.

But if, effectvely, the only way web users find or discover a small site is through a large one that acts as an intermediary (middleman) then perhaps the fact of the intermediary poses a greater, more practical threat of "censorship" than a lack of Section 230 immunity.

Because Section 230 has allowed the growth of "Big Tech", the argument around small sites with controversial content "staying online" is no longer only an issue of having Section 230 protection, it is an issue of whether certain gigantic, third party intermediaries will allow these small sites to be found/discovered and to continue to receive "service". Operating a personal website is rare. Publishing on the web today is mostly sharecropping in a feudal system. It's publishing pages on someone else's website.

Section 230 allowed the www to go from a public resource to a private one, controlled by a handful of mega-sized websites, now with so much cash and control over the web's direction that no one thinks of them as merely websites anymore. We are now stuck with a web of intermediaries, middelmen formed for commercial purpose of surveilling web users and targeted them with ads. The big ones are so big that people believe they do not need Section 230 protection. But they could never have grown so big without Section 230.

Section 230 has positive effects and it has negative ones. It's good and it's bad. There are Section 230's well-intentioned, theoretical incentives and then there are actual, historical events that it has enabled. What actually happened.

No one can predict the future. But Section 230 is an experiment that has run its course. We know what happened and we know the role that Section 230 played in it.

[DoItToMe81]

Section 230 prevents small hosts from going to jail because somebody illicitly used their site for pirate uploads or illegal speech. Don't be naive. No section 230 means no 'small internet', because anybody can get you criminally charged.

The removal of comparative protections in the UK is why British web communities collapsed, from small forums to huge communities like Liveleak. We shouldn't pretend this is good.

[saurik]

This is nonsensical. First off, if someone illicitly uses your site for something Section 230 isn't what is protecting you from that: if I hack into your computers and inject a bunch of content onto it, you aren't somehow more liable than if I went to your building in the middle of the night and graffitied something illegal all over it just because it uses a computer: you were also a victim.

As for "small web forums", that's still centralized, and still bad (and frankly is often worse, as the smaller players tend to have poorer data control policies)! I don't want anyone, anywhere, at any scale controlling centralized forums :/.

If you want to build an online gathering place, maybe it is in fact a very very good thing if it has to be built using decentralized end-to-end encryption with customizable endpoint filtering, and the "web forum" becomes a relic of the past.

It should be hard to build a centralized web service. There should be any number of scary liabilities that come with doing such, and that is frankly the only way we are ever going to get to a decentralized future, as, otherwise, yes: as it stands, we are essentially subsidizing the existence of centralized services.

And maybe we needed to do this in the 90s and 00s, but we now live in a world with a lot better understanding of encryption and a lot better understanding of peer-to-peer services and if we just stopped tolerating centralized services enough to force everyone to deal with the always-will-be-a-bit-worse experience of decentralized ones, we can escape this ad-infused dystopia (and remember: even the small players use ads, and their ads are again often worse).

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

Correction:

s/but it protects/but its sunsetting would protect/