Partisan Divide Over Section 230 Emerges In New House Proposal

LOS ANGELES—Congressional efforts to scale back or even repeal Section 230 — the “First Amendment of the Internet” — have been largely bipartisan. Numerous bills are now circulating in the House and Senate to cut back the online free speech protections offered by the 24-year-old law, and most have both Republican and Democratic sponsors. In addition, in the presidential election, both Republican incumbent Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden have called for Section 230 to be done away with. The law allows freedom of expression online by freeing platforms from worrying about legal liability for content posted by users. The law is crucial for all forms of internet expression — but especially for controversial material such as online porn.  But the bipartisan unity over Section 230 may have shown its first signs of cracking this week, when House Democrats issued a 449-page policy proposal for reforming the big tech industry, including platforms such as Facebook and Google which rely on Section 230 protections to allow users freedom to post essentially whatever they want. The report was issued Tuesday by the Democrat-controlled House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee after a 16 month investigation into Facebook, Apple, Google, and Amazon.  In the report, Democrats call for strict antitrust actions against the technology giants, forcing the companies to break up their operations into separate corporate structures. Under the proposal, the companies would also now be banned from purchasing startup companies, or possible rivals — the way Facebook over recent years has purchased Instagram and WhatsApp, both of which provided similar services to Facebook.   "To put it simply, companies that once were scrappy, underdog startups that challenged the status quo have become the kinds of monopolies we last saw in the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons," committee Chair Jerry Nadler writes in the report. "Although these firms have delivered clear benefits to society, the dominance of Apple, Facebook, and Google has come at a price." But Republicans on the committee rejected the plans to break up the big tech firms. Instead, they filed their own report titled “Reigning in Big Tech’s Censorship of Conservatives,” saying that the only real reform needed to big tech is a revamp or repeal of Section 230.  One Republican member of the committee, Ken Buck of Colorado, called the Democratic proposals “non-starters for conservatives.” Another, Judiciary Commitee Ranking Member Jim Jordan of Ohio, said that Democrats ignored that ““Big tech is out to get conservatives.”  The Democratic proposal “advances radical proposals that would refashion antitrust law in the vision of the far left,” Jordan said. Photo By Minette Lontsie / Wikimedia Commons