Big Business Takes Aim At Section 230, Foundation of the Internet

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has long been considered the law underlying the guarantee of free expression on the internet. The law shields online platforms and service providers from being held legally responsible for material posted by third parties. In other words, your ISP—or a social media platform like Facebook—is not a “publisher” and under the law can’t be sued like one. Without Section 230, platforms would be burdened with the unmanageable task of policing every piece of content that appears on their sites—and as a result would end up severely restricting that content. But in 2018, Congress passed the supposed anti-sex trafficking law known as FOSTA/SESTA, which began to chip away at the protections guaranteed by the 24-year-old law. But the law found a pair of unlikely backers in the Disney Corporation and 21st Century Fox, two of the media and entertainment industry’s most dominant mega-companies—neither of which had shown any special interest in the problem of sex trafficking before. Those corporations are now being joined by IBM, the Marriott, Hilton and Hyatt hotel chains, and even the News Media Alliance—a news media industry lobbying  group—as allies in the new war on Section 230, for varying ostensible reasons, according to a New York Times report, which notes that the Times itself is a member of the News Media Alliance.  The corporations have received political support across the ideological spectrum. Republican Senator Josh Hawley has introduced a bill that would eliminate Section 230 protections for “big tech” firms—those with at least 30 million United States users.  At the same time, Democratic presidential frontrunner Joe Biden last month called for Section 230 to be “revoked,” and even the two most left-wing current presidential candidates, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, voted in favor of the FOSTA/SESTA Section 230 rollback in 2018. For entertainment firms such as Disney and others represented by the Motion Picture Association of America, Section 230 is viewed an an open door for copyright violators, according to the Times report. Stripping away the law’s protections would give the giant companies far greater control over corporate-owned content. The hotel chains, according to the Times, are primarily interested in taking away Section 230 protections for AirBnB, the online short-term rental service that directly competes with traditional hoteliers for the business of travel consumers. According to Internet Association President Michael Beckerman, however, the 90 percent of Americans who now use the internet regularly would see a very different online world without Section 230, which is “foundational to almost everything people do online,” he told the Times. “It enables products and services that consumers love and rely upon every day,”  Beckerman said. Photo By Mark Ahsmann / Wikimedia Commons