The US Supreme Court doesn’t understand the internet

https://www.wired.com/story/the-supreme-court-section-230-the-internet/

by mikece • 3 years ago

110 178 3 years ago

mikece2• 3 years ago

Alternate link: https://archive.ph/qHVIX

Veen• 3 years ago

It seems to me the difference in this case is that it complains about content promotion, not content publishing. The issue is that YouTube's algorithms promoted extremist content to people who were prone to extremist behavior. That's not quite the same as simply hosting extremist content uploaded by users.

As it says on the Supreme Court site:

"Issue: Whether Section 230(c)(1) of the Communications Decency Act immunizes interactive computer services when they make targeted recommendations of information provided by another information content provider, or only limits the liability of interactive computer services when they engage in traditional editorial functions (such as deciding whether to display or withdraw) with regard to such information."

https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/gonzalez-v-googl...

circuit102• 3 years ago

How could they fix that? If it was that easy to reliably identify illegal/extremist content and prevent it from being recommended they’d just take it down

Zak• 3 years ago

The obvious options if targeted recommendations are found not to be protected is to only use them with curated content (Netflix) or not use them (reddit).

eli13• 3 years ago

Google decides what emails go in the gmail inbox vs spam folder vs rejected outright. Should they be legally responsible if an offensive email lands in your inbox?

prepend2• 3 years ago

I don’t think spam filtering is promoting content as it is removing material.

I think they would be liable if they took emails that weren’t addressed to you and showed them in your inbox and it did some harm.

Or if they showed an ad that did some harm.

karmelapple2• 3 years ago

My inbox is not available to the public, have public “like” counts and view counts, cannot be shared with a single click with the same viral network effects (sure, emails can be forwarded, but I think we can agree sharing emails vs sharing on social media is wildly different).

So I think there’s a reasonable argument to be made about the difference here. Agree?

megous• 3 years ago

There are not ToS associated specifically with gmail. The service has no guarantees or expectations set whatsoever. You get better guarantees on email reception from running your own server.

Therefore it's hard to say what the gmail user could even base their complaint on. Google can do whatever they want with the incomming email as far as categorization and blocking goes, and nothing in the nonexistent ToS is violated.

PaulHoule• 3 years ago

Has it ever?

mikece2• 3 years ago

I suspect Section 230 will need to be revamped or at least more thoroughly defined. Some interpretations suggest that any editorial action by a platform (aside from those required by law) changes them from being a common carrier to a publisher with all of the liability that goes with it. It only makes sense that there should be an intermediate zone where a platform provider can engage in editorialism/content restriction without falling under the liability of being a publisher.

mmcconnell16183• 3 years ago

I wonder of scale of distribution would be a reasonable way to scope liability. For example, if you create a post and 50 of your friends see it, immunity for the platform. If you create a post and the platform distributes it to 1 million people, they now have publisher liability.

warner253• 3 years ago

I think this is really smart. It reminds me of something I read within the last few months, but can't find right now, that described the descent from "social networking" (a nearly forgotten term, despite being the term for websites like Facebook just a decade ago) into the hell of modern "social media." The key difference is that social networking was about connecting with people you actually knew (realistically up to a couple hundred people), and social media is about broadcasting to the masses (measured in thousands or millions) with the help of these algorithms to promote engagement at any cost. That's where everything just went off the rails, from my perspective. I don't know why your comment got down-voted.

Edited to add: It seems like this is what distinguishes a telephone company from a television broadcaster too.

Retric3• 3 years ago

The problem isn’t the definition it’s that companies want the common carrier status without actually acting like one. The phone company doesn’t editorialize and we would think it insane if they started doing so.

pwinnski• 3 years ago

The phone company doesn't fill your line 24/7 with unsolicited and illegal content, either, which any unmoderated comment section does.

eli13• 3 years ago

You would want Hacker News or any other forum to be legally responsible for comments posted by users?

mrguyorama2• 3 years ago

Except we are right now screaming that the phone companies should be responsible for eliminating spam from the phone system! That exact moderation should not cause them to lose their common carrier status, and that moderation should be expected, and that moderation should not cause them to be responsible if someone uses their phone network to call in a bomb threat.

All section 230 does is make clear that if you don't have people signing off on each and every bit of content on your platform, but respond with a good effort to reports of illegal content, then you will not be held responsible for someone using your platform as a way to do illegal things.

If all these weird people that misunderstand this get what they want, it doesn't mean youtube recommends their conservative creators more, what it means is that youtube stops doing any personalized recommendations, and all you are going to see on youtube is Logan Paul, Mr Beast, and the other mega creators that little children love.

ajross• 3 years ago

Some interpretations suggest that any editorial action by a platform [...] changes them from being a common carrier to a publisher

None that have been made with a straight face before a real court, that I'm aware of. That's the spin that the activists put on this, not something that anyone thinks SCOTUS is going to rule on.

You're absolutely right that 230 as written doesn't really speak well to the modern semi-automated echo chamber. But improperly written laws are congress's job to fix, not the courts. Courts step in when laws conflict, they aren't there to figure out how to solve problems with new laws.

The simplest way to look at the spirit of this law is: Congress said that internet companies shouldn't be punished just for hosting other people's opinions. And at the end of the day, TikTok and YouTube and Facebook are still just hosting this data. They didn't write it. They don't curate it. Anyone can post. Anyone can read.

Arguments about "recommendation algorithms" are legitimate, but not really in scope of the first amendment and liability issues envisioned by the original law. They're just not. It's not something congress thought about. And if congress didn't have a clue, why should the courts?

mrguyorama2• 3 years ago

You're absolutely right that 230 as written doesn't really speak well to the modern semi-automated echo chamber.

Section 230 does not speak about this because section 230 wasn't supposed to care about this. Section 230 was entirely about protecting large companies from legal harm when, say, the christchurch shooter posts their spree on your platform, or someone uploads literal child porn to your platform, as long as you attempt to remove such content when it appears. Section 230 is simply a legal admission that moderation is hard but necessary, and a single failure should not doom your platform.

If we think the way large platforms recommend content is harmful, we should write legislation for that, instead of yet again fucking with a working law to hammer it into something it wasn't meant to do. The USA loves to do that and all it does is give us really shitty legislation.

freejazz18• 3 years ago

The simplest way to look at the spirit of this law is: Congress said that internet companies shouldn't be punished just for hosting other people's opinions. And at the end of the day, TikTok and YouTube and Facebook are still just hosting this data. They didn't write it. They don't curate it. Anyone can post. Anyone can read.

Okay - so in your universe, it's just as easy to punish them, not for the hosting, but the promotion of the content which is explicitly not covered in 230...

pessimizer2• 3 years ago

It only makes sense that there should be an intermediate zone

Care to share any of that sense?

koboll3• 3 years ago

Any Web 2.0 system's basic premise is that it provides a space where humans can be humans. The bedrock assumption is that people can POST things that a server will instantly and automatically display publicly, and that the server owner will not instantly become legally liable for what they post.

This mirrors pretty well how the rest of the world operates. If I walk into a Macy's and start screaming libel or inciting a riot, the Macy's Corporation is not liable for that speech. Why should a 'digital property' like a social media site work differently?

Of course, it doesn't totally erase the server owner's liability. If someone posts child pornography that my server displays, it is my responsibility to remove it as soon as I become aware of it, just as it is Macy's responsibility to escort the libel-screamer off the premises. Failure to do that can confer liability onto me.

To break this consensus is to break the ability to foster human interactions on the internet that mirror how humans interact in the real world.

mmcconnell16183• 3 years ago

I wonder if making platforms liable for providing the identity of content producers is a fair balance between providing the platform immunity and allowing those potentially harmed by content to pursue the content creator if needed.

XorNot• 3 years ago

How is mandating cyberstalking access going to solve anything?

mmcconnell16183• 3 years ago

One of the first challenges was the Zeran v. American Online case where a business owner was harmed but was never able to compel AOL to provide the identity of the person creating the harmful content. Forcing platforms to provide identity information in pursuit of legal action would allow action against the formally anonymous poster. As it stands today, an anonymous person (or botnet) can post whatever they want with no fear they will be exposed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeran_v._America_Online,_Inc.

bryan_w• 3 years ago

I think it's an interesting idea to explore. I think if a platform makes a good faith effort to know their users that it would be able to defer liability onto them. Ideally this would be coupled with a privacy aware proof of identity system but perhaps that's asking for too much.

Sites could still allow anonymous communication, but it would need to vet it first and assume liability.

You can't go out in public in a mask and say "John Smith eats worms" (when he doesn't) and not have any repercussions.

causi3• 3 years ago

Whether Section 230(c)(1) of the Communications Decency Act immunizes interactive computer services when they make targeted recommendations of information provided by another information content provider

Should it? This feels a lot like a "have your cake and eat it too" situation. Either you're a neutral party or you are not. Being a trillion-dollar company doesn't exempt you from that. Letting a computer make the decisions instead of a person doesn't exempt you either.

Youtube would be in no danger if all it was doing was keyword-matching with recommended videos. Instead it created profit by designing its algorithm to maximize engagement by any means necessary, especially via outrage and bandwagoning. What the fuck did they expect to happen when they created a money engine that runs on human emotional intensity?

ladyattis• 3 years ago

The thing is that the law as written allows them to do just that. If they don't like your content on YouTube, they can punt it instantly. And it can be for ANY REASON. And that's not even including their first amendment right to refuse distributing or listing your content.

causi3• 3 years ago

If they don't like your content on YouTube, they can punt it instantly. And it can be for ANY REASON

Certainly. But Section 230, at least from my reading, does not protect them for the promotion of content. I could be wrong about that. The Supreme Court will decide. Personally I'd find it delightful if the rage-engine got smashed with a legal hammer and my Youtube recommendations were as useful as they were fifteen years ago.

freejazz18• 3 years ago

What does that have to do with the affirmative act they undertake of promoting certain materials? That's the issue - not that they punt thing, but that they promote things and that promoting things isn't the same as just hosting third party uploaded content. They take that third party content and show it to people to generate interest and advertising revenue. That's not the same thing as blindly hosting.

mistermann• 3 years ago

The thing is that the law as written allows them to do just that. If they don't like your content on YouTube, they can punt it instantly. And it can be for ANY REASON. And that's not even including their first amendment right to refuse distributing or listing your content.

You're not wrong, but in addition to the leeway afforded to the rich and powerful by "the law", there is also substantial leeway afforded to every individual under "reality", and one option available is that it is technically possible to behave however one likes, including in a manner that is not compliant with "the law" or "the social contract", neither of which I or most anyone else was consulted on, despite living in a country governed by "democracy".

Interestingly, it seems like it is those who are classically "less intelligent" who are most likely to realize that this powerful exploit exists, buffoonery like January 6, anti-vaxx, and shooting power stations with an off the shelf rifle being prime examples of this.

I sometimes wonder if like corporations or most any other organization on the planet, it might be prudent to review our governmental and legal standard operating procedures from time to time to ensure they are working as intended (underlying, actual intent (as opposed to proclaimed intent) being another matter that more than a few people are starting to become rather dangerously curious about).

2OEH8eoCRo0• 3 years ago

Perhaps it would be useful to separate these functionalities into two categories: User-initiated (searches) and passive (sidebar garbage, play next video trash, etc).

Giving the user the ability to search doesn't mean you're curating content with a recommendation engine.

montagg• 3 years ago

I think by the logic of "either you're a neutral party or you are not" no provider, big or small, is a neutral party, but I don't think this would produce the best outcome. It's a very good thing if we have lots of sites making different editorial decisions about what is and isn't allowed from users in a community—whether it's a search engine, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc—and let the competition of different rulesets in a market determine who gets traffic, attention, and revenue.

But making editorial decisions downstream—what it chooses to show to users first vs last—doesn't change what people contribute, and this is where Section 230 is trying to provide a balance. People can contribute whatever great or terrible things they contribute, and Section 230s stance is, the provider just has to remove it if it's actually out of bounds. That allows sites to have their own editorial decision-making downstream while allowing user-generated content to flourish upstream, so those decisions matter at all. If the burden of moderation is moved farther upstream, to the point at which people contribute, you've increased the barrier to creating content entirely, you've turned every social network into a newspaper, and you get none of the benefits of the scale, low barrier to entry, and low marginal cost of the Internet to content creation.

In my view, an algorithm is no different than the downstream moderation decisions every website makes with or without an algorithm. Of course an algorithm has values. That's the point! They should have values, and people should choose which sites to use based on how well those design decisions translate into value for the user. Rather than the existence of out-of-bounds content in their systems at all, we should be judging YouTube and others on how well they identify and how quickly they remove that content and how quickly they update their policies (which is just another word for algorithm) to reflect those new values. This is explicitly a tradeoff for making mistakes in the interest of making progress versus safety, because what I'm advocating here does mean you get terrible stuff posted to places where it can get a lot of reach, and it's more likely to get that reach than with a system that moderates farther upstream. Where I think we should be coming down stronger is in regulating reach, not access (at least not entirely). The speed of the stream—the speed of virility—should be slowed to allow for reason to re-enter the conversation. That's where I think regulating content on the Internet needs updating, but not so far upstream that you stop it from getting any kind of reach at all.

The practical framework for regulation that I'd suggest is, if something hits a threshold of reach, it gets moderated more heavily and judged more heavily by authorities.

Related: Deciding on what counts as "out of bounds" content is also extremely hard, but we can put that side for a second, because I think the main issues here are 1) if a moderation decision is required, and 2) where the moderation decision occurs.

shadowgovt4• 3 years ago

There's a good breakdown of the situation and arguments here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzNo5lZCq5M).

The tl;dr is that it may not be possible to split a hair as thin as the difference between an automated recommendation algorithm and automated (or manual) moderation (if the system chooses not to put your tweets in the Trending Topics, are we refraining from up-signalling you or down-signalling you? Is "signal" on a continuous real number line or two separate number lines?).

If the Court rules narrowly against Google, it'll be a major change to the function of much of the Internet (we can expect companies to respond to the new liability by switching off their recommendation systems completely), but the fundamental way-of-life we know today will continue. If the Court rules broadly against Google, it functionally kills S230 and opens the entire Internet up to massive liability lawsuits in a way that may end online fora for all but the "judgment proof" of the world.

Not even HN would likely be able to afford to operate if anyone posting a controversial idea slips through the moderation cracks and gets seen. The site would have to go to moderate-all-by-default, not post-and-then-moderate.

anonymouskimmer2• 3 years ago

I presume that non-profit forums would be judgement proof (literal first amendment grounds). Possibly even including non-profit forums attached to a for-profit entity. With regard to Hacker News in particular the only possibly problematic element would be the YC-linked advertisement posts.

Of course I'm not a lawyer. But section 230 is not the only protection here.

falcolas• 3 years ago

Youtube would be in no danger if all it was doing was keyword-matching with recommended videos.

What order should those keyword matching videos come back in? By total views, by 30 day views, popularity, by upvotes, by downvotes, by keywords in the title, the description, the comments, the video itself?

Any choice made would be effectively indistinguishable from "designing the [search] to maximize engagement" as it comes to the law, since search itself is a method of surfacing new videos, and the order (even if only the default order) would matter.

kelnos4• 3 years ago

"designing the [search] to maximize engagement" as it comes to the law

I don't think the law has a definition for that term. I think it's -- probably correctly -- up to judges (and/or juries, depending on the type of case) to weigh intent and decide if a search engine to be liable for the results it produces.

This idea that "doing literally anything is an evil engagement maximizer" seems too simplistic for how the world actually works.

pgodzin4• 3 years ago

Choosing keyword matching as the algorithm is explicitly a way to target recommendations of information provided by another information content provider. As is sorting by most recently updated, as is using a machine learning model that optimizes for engagement.

All of those approaches can lead to illegal content, and the entire point of Section 230 is that regardless of which they choose, they are immune from any legal repercussions of surfacing that content.

njharman• 3 years ago

Newsstands, bookstores recommend items. Ones they put on front, at eye level, on the "look at this" table as you walk in. We don't typically hold them liable.

In meatspace we don't generally hold those making recommendations liable for the 3rd party content. We shouldn't online either.

kelnos4• 3 years ago

If a newsstand was promoting ISIS recruitment propaganda, you better believe we'd hold that newsstand responsible for harm caused by that recommendation.

As we should, IMO.

pchristensen• 3 years ago

And those recommendations are the same for every person that shops there. So they would pay a stiff penalty in the market if they promoted extreme content, whereas YT and social media can present a customized "bookstore" for each person, without the consequences of everyone else seeing what it's recommending.

indymike2• 3 years ago

I remember when DCMA passed, and everyone assumed that "safe harbor" meant that if a provider moderated or policed the content, then that service would be liable. If they just allowed things to pass through, not unlike the phone company, then the company could claim safe harbor. The law was designed to shield ISPs and online services from liability for what their users did with the service, not to enable content filtering and moderation... and in many ways it is the opposite of the intent of congress, which was just trying to make it so you wouldn't be sued into oblivion because a user of your service did something bad.

singleshot_2• 3 years ago

“Section 230 was intended to clarify that the government would not impose liability on internet companies even if they moderated their content.” -Jeff Kosseff

How come you and Jeff Kosseff seem to think opposite ideas about whether 230 was intended to enable content providers to moderate content? I wonder who is right.

Sai_• 3 years ago

I came the opposite conclusion as you.

Say your friend looks great in a piece of clothing. Based on just this, the next time they ask you what they should buy, you suggest the style and brand they looked good in before.

A day later, you discover that the brand in question clubs baby seals.

Does this suddenly make you liable for all the atrocities the brand commits?

Superficially, a YT recommendation is based on metadata - video length? Did the user watch the video beyond threshold values? Did they comment or react to a video? Where do this user’s metrics like in comparison to metrics of other users who watched the same video?

I concluded that since the algorithms aren’t moderating the content, just your access to it, they are not afoul of S230.

Maybe the answer is to require all social media to provide a strictly timeline based view. Even here, the submission time stamp is purely metadata about the content, as is the watch duration or “comment/react?” flags.

Nasrudith• 3 years ago

That is a complete non-sequitur and yet people take that propaganda seriously. Section 230 says nothing about being neutral. The "whole question" is like asking if your driver's license is still valid when you are wearing a purple necktie, then asserting that drivers licenses aren't valid then because a purple tie excludes green and yellow and that ruins society and promotes pollution for the sake of privilege because purple was reserved for royals.

If you ignore the emotional manipulation sophistry and look at the logical content it looks a lot more like a thought disorder than anything else.

Hacktrick• 3 years ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20230222164232/https://www.wired...

coffeeblack• 3 years ago

230 would be okay if the user had the ability to choose the algorithm that determines what content that user sees.

That was one of the early ideas for Twitter when Musk took over. Could even have external, independent “filter providers”.

Then the user a chose what bubble they want to live in. Or none at all, if they are brave enough to see opposing opinions.

But if the web site decides the algorithm for the user, well, then the web site is the same as a newspaper or TV channel.

koboll3• 3 years ago

The problem is that with modern ML-based recommendation systems there is not really an "algorithm" at all.

Which is probably the reason that particular promise from Musk never actually went anywhere.

jabroni_salad• 3 years ago

given the rate at which youtube takes in new videos (millions per day), I think you would be supremely lucky to see anything even resembling "an opinion" in a truly unfiltered list.

cebu• 3 years ago

just a series of tubes

shadowgovt4• 3 years ago

FWIW, the Supreme Court doesn't need to understand the Internet to do its job.

A judge's job is to understand the law. It is the job of the lawyers to bring facts and argumentation before the judges to pursuade them that the law should be interpreted one way or the other. The expertise is expected to live with the lawyers, not the judges (and the ability to find expert witnesses and spin up on the details of what they're advocating is a lawyer skill).

kube-system6• 3 years ago

Yes, this is the most frustrating thing about these kind of article titles. Justice Kagan isn't saying "we have no clue what we're doing" she's saying, "I'm not sure you're in the right place"

corbulo3• 3 years ago

It's really grounded in an anti-adversarial process ideology. Pre-empting it and demanding there should only be one side dictating what is and isn't true.

Thats probably overanalyzing a narrative piece for their owners but its what this accumulates to at scale.

tristor5• 3 years ago

The reality is that most people, EVEN technical people, don't actually understand the Internet. The only people I consistently have conversed with who understand the Internet are technology advocates that have a deep background in Internet networking. Even on HN, most people believe many things about how the Internet works, at the networking layer, at the application layer, and socioculturally, that are not true, and provably not true, but widely believed. A true headline would be "Hardly anyone who isn't at least a double CCIE with ~15 years of experience in web policy understands the Internet."

Most technical people don't understand DNS, and it's one of the most basic and core technologies to how the Internet works today. The courts definitely don't understand DNS. The vast majority don't understand BGP, and it's literally the basis for how Internet networking works. Many don't understand the Web as a tech stack, outside possibly the basics of website design. Even people who develop web applications don't understand the Web as a tech stack.

It's actually a major concern for me, because the promise that future generations would be "digital natives" with deep technology understanding didn't come to fruition. The knowledge of how all of this infrastructure actually works is dying off, and very few people are interested in learning it, and the entire global economy is now built on the Internet in a myriad of ways. Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/2347/ except extrapolate from open source software to literally all essential technologies the world runs on.

automatoney• 3 years ago

Even on HN, most people believe many things about how the Internet works, at the networking layer, at the application layer, and socioculturally, that are not true, and provably not true, but widely believed.

Could you debunk some of the most common/biggest false beliefs you encounter? I'm curious to see which traps I fall into.

tristor5• 3 years ago

There's so many I'm not sure where to begin. A few simple ones that most people believe about networking on the Internet that aren't true are:

1. Routing paths are primarily decided by path distance as the metric.

2. IP ownership is authenticated and therefore the global route table is deterministic and stable.

3. DNS traffic is always over UDP/53

4. DNS is controlled by the network. Related, split horizon DNS is reliable.

5. Domain registrars and the root nameservers are required to be contacted in order to get a DNS response for a given public domain. As a corollary, seizing domains or blocking DNS at the root is a sufficient method to block access to a site. Secondary corollary, a correctly configured and valid public domain is reachable from anywhere on the Internet that can make a DNS query.

A lot of these are true in /some cases/, or in the general case, but not in the corner cases. A lot of policy and court decisions about the Internet assume the happy path or the common case when dealing with situations where motivated actors may take actions outside the happy path to work around that court order. It is entirely possible to bypass public DNS to resolve a public IP on the Internet as long as it routable, regardless of what registrars or public (and root) nameservers say. (see: Pirate Bay and their shenanigans, also see Tor resolvers, see non-authoritative DNS resolvers, see host file sharing, see alternate roots, etc.)

A lot of policies within organizations, including those set by network admins, are based on a belief that systems in their network obey the things provided by their network, when in fact the client controls nearly everything about how it decides to interact with a network, and the network can only provide configuration as a suggestion or recommendation. There are very limited options for enforcing policy at the network level. There is no guarantee that any given client on your network is actually utilizing your local DNS resolvers or successfully will resolve split horizon DNS.

A lot of configurations in the world are based on trust in systems which are inherently designed in an untrustworthy manner, or which require additional configuration and technology to provide an external basis for trust. This has had consequences with far-reaching impact and will continue to do (see BGP hijacking).

DNS, except when using newer protocols and taking extra measures to authenticate responses, is easily intercepted and hijacked. It is entirely possible to capture queries and inject non-authoritative responses, including responses which claim to be authoritative at any point in the path the query traverses. This is actually commonplace in some regions of the world (see: China). DNS that is authenticated and encrypted doesn't traverse UDP/53.

koboll3• 3 years ago

The reality is that most people, EVEN technical people, don't actually understand the Internet.

Nothing gives me Gell-Mann amnesia quite like the comments that get upvoted on HN posts relevant to the particular area in which I work...

warner253• 3 years ago

Yeah, I actually find it really disconcerting. It's one thing when you read mainstream news stories and see that they're inaccurate; like, "OK, sure the writer is a journalist, obviously not a specialist in this area, and the intended audience is also comprised of non-specialists." But reading HN makes me feel very inadequate 99% of the time, in terms of my knowledge of the computing domain. Then every few months I see a thread about some specific thing that I feel quite comfortable with and it's like, "What on earth? I thought these people were all smarter than me, but look at these comments..."

I'm currently a PhD student doing research related to Tor, and there was a thread about Tor last month. I didn't even know where to start with the comments, so I didn't participate at all.

billythemaniam• 3 years ago

I don't think it is necessary to understand how the internet works technically to "understand the internet". It's like saying a race car driver can't drive fast without understanding the physics of a piston.

tristor5• 3 years ago

I get what you're saying, but I think you might be missing the point that I'm making. DNS and BGP aren't JUST technical, they're also deeply geopolitical. The Internet isn't an accident, it's an intentionally and carefully formed set of peer autonomous networks, with a shared protocol and written (and unwritten) rules for how we name and resolve the path to get to those different networks from one another. These standards, the technical implementation of them, and how they interact with the real world is actually deeply geopolitical as well as socioeconomic. It's not just understanding how it works technically, it's understanding how it works from a policy, standardization, and governance perspective. Just like the law, how we arrived at the particular standards and policies informs the context for decisions we make about the technology and how its implemented.

Even then, without an understanding of how it works technically, it's not possible to responsibly and accurately adjudicate the law as it relates to these technologies. How BGP and DNS work is actually front and center in many court cases, where the decision rested on a basic misunderstanding, which rendered the outcome either ineffective or unjust. Think of all the cases where DNS blocking is utilized on a court order, not realizing that this is effectively meaningless and is not actually effective.

People don't often understand how deep this rabbit hole goes, even technical people who understand the basics of routing. They don't actually understand what a "peering agreement" means, especially what it means when it crosses an international border. The way that the law interacts with the Internet is an integration point that has an especially high level of complexity, and nearly no-one involved in that complexity in our current system day to day is actually qualified to discuss it.

When we have failures in this integration point is has deep reaching impacts that have broad implications for how technology continues to develop into the future, and there are both positive and negative consequences for this. As a simple example, the stupidity with courts and DNS blocking and the way in which some governments around the world behave in relation to DNS is actually a core reason why DoH and DoT exist, because misapplication of law based on misunderstanding of technology risked fundamentally breaking the basic building blocks of the Internet required for it to function and for networks to successfully interoperate, so the people who actually understand how it works had to come up with new technology to "route around" stupidity in legislatures and courts around the world. These new technologies /themselves/ have geopolitical consequences (see UK and EU stupidity regarding crypto and its implications for DoH and DoT).

It's not JUST understanding the technology, there's the 0th layer and the 8th layer in the reference model.

yamtaddle2• 3 years ago

Do you thing Cisco router configurations of BGP or whatever have anything to do with how this case is going to be decided?

I'm pretty sure that's not what was meant by "understand the Internet", in this context.

tristor5• 3 years ago

This particular case? No. Many other cases, yes. I think there is a severe lack of understanding in the court system at every level, not just with BGP.

pixl975• 3 years ago

EVEN technical people, don't actually understand the Internet

Didn't Isaac Asimov write a documentary on this call 'Foundation'?

rayiner• 3 years ago

The Wired article’s title is frustrating. I’m pretty sure the Supreme Court does “understand the internet.” The judge I clerked for wrote the original decision that struck down most of the CDA except Section 230, which the Supreme Court later affirmed. If you go read that decision, it’s got a pretty accurate description of the internet: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/we... (see Findings of Fact).

For example it talks about routing:

“The Internet uses ‘packet switching’ communication protocols that allow individual messages to be subdivided into smaller ‘packets’ that are then sent independently to the destination, and are then automatically reassembled by the receiving computer. While all packets of a given message often travel along the same path to the destination, if computers along the route become overloaded, the packets can be re-routed to less loaded computers.”

And that was back in the 1990s. What people seem to really mean when they say “the Supreme Court doesn’t understand X” is that the Supreme Court doesn’t share the values they associate with X. That’s almost certainly the case. From the Supreme Court’s view, the internet is just another part of the national economy. They don’t understand or care about the distinct cultural values of people in that sector.

glitchc• 3 years ago

Hear hear! Sounds like Wired is a mouthpiece for Big Tech.

wil421• 3 years ago

Wired has been in the same camp as the Verge, IGN, Mac Rumors, and so on for a while now. They are closer to a tabloid than what Wired Magazine once was.

Not sure who they are a mouthpiece for but they certainly don’t mind being one.

kridsdale1• 3 years ago

I cancelled my WIRED subscription last week after their horribly insulting “review” of the Hogwarts game.

fortenforge• 3 years ago

I encourage anyone who thinks the Supreme Court is composed of 9 wordcel idiots who can't possibly understand anything about computers to read their opinion in Google v. Oracle [1]. It's very readable and well-argued. It's like a reverse Gell-Mann amnesia—clearly the author of the draft understands the issues at play quite well.

[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/18-956_d18f.pdf

hnfong2• 3 years ago

Google v. Oracle is one of the most anticlimactic decisions I've read.

The decision does show that the Supreme Court justices are savvy as to how the tech industry works, at least they know from a policy perspective they can't strike down the whole Android ecosystem without causing mayhem. And they know they can't affirm copyrights of APIs for similar reasons.

But from a legal perspective the way they outright dodged the legal question they were supposed to answer (i.e. are APIs copyrightable?) and the way they just asserted the conclusion about fair use without pretending to apply legal reasoning (together with a disclaimer that they haven't tried to change the existing law even if it looks like they have), I wouldn't say it's one of their better decisions.

As you say, in general people in tech have a tendency to assume judges are idiots. Most often they aren't, because judges sitting in the top courts are a handful of people at the pinnacle of their field, and they don't get there by being idiots. I agree with you that it's a good idea to sample some opinions from Supreme Courts or perhaps even others appeal courts to gain an appreciation of how judges tend to think. I just think Google v. Oracle is one of the worse ones to start with..

telotortium• 3 years ago

Also, even if the Supreme Court judges are older, the decisions are written, to a very significant degree, by the Supreme Court clerks, who are generally the very best law school grads in the US a few years out from graduation (so generally around 30).

corbulo3• 3 years ago

Wired is owned by the same people who own Reddit. They're providing narrative in case 230 gets shit on.

boh• 3 years ago

The article doesn't really explain what it is about the internet that isn't being understood. Even if these companies have been identified under the general "tech" category by investment firms, they're essentially media companies and there's no reason why they should be exempt from the regulations of other media companies. The idea that somehow first amendment rights will somehow be overtly compromised by adding extra responsibilities for internet companies would require us to ignore the censorship these companies have been willfully prompting in the past decade.

karmelapple2• 3 years ago

If I start a TV network on basic cable and let anyone submit a video that will be broadcast live on air in real time, that network will likely be broadcasting user-submitted material that would not be allowed to be shown on TV during the daytime per FCC decency standards.

How is YouTube different than this? Or Facebook, Twitter, or any other social media that is free to see once you have an internet connection?

kjksf• 3 years ago

Here's the difference:

TV network made a deal with the government (FCC): they got a monopoly access to a limited resource (spectrum).

In exchange they agreed to limitations set by FCC, like decency standards.

Limitations that go beyond what the law, as created by congress, requires.

YouTube or Facebook didn't make a similar deal with FCC because they use unconstrained resource (internet bandwidth).

Furthermore congress did the right thing and created a law explicitly calling out this scenario and made internet companies not liable for user generated content.

Why did they do it? Because without that there would be madness.

migf• 3 years ago

I think the Supreme Court has a real out here to say, "Fuck, we dunno" and rule to change nothing and suggest that Congress remedy the situation through new laws. That's ideologically consistent and the right move. I would be astonished if they don't do that here.

kube-system6• 3 years ago

A lot of news outlets are just posting the funny part of Kagan's quote and not the rest of the context... but it sounds like that's exactly what she was saying.

"We're a court. We really don't know about these things. You know, these are not like the nine greatest experts on the internet," Kagan said of her colleagues, eliciting a laugh from the courtroom gallery. "There's a lot of uncertainty going the way you would have us go, in part, just because of the difficulty of drawing lines in this area and just because of the fact that, once we go with you, all of a sudden we're finding that Google isn't protected. And maybe Congress should want that system, but isn't that something for Congress to do, not the court?"

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/supreme-court-wrestles-immun...

shagie2• 3 years ago

https://wapo.st/3lWw2Rg

Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan said one could question why Congress provided such immunity when passing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. But she drew laughter when she wondered how far the Supreme Court should go in cutting back such protection.
“We’re a court. We really don’t know about these things. You know, these are not like the nine greatest experts on the internet,” Kagan said.
Kavanaugh said Congress knows that lower courts have interpreted the protections broadly. “Isn’t it better ... to put the burden on Congress to change that, and they can consider the implications and make these predictive judgments?” he asked Stewart.

---

Justice Kagan's exchange for that segment is on page 45 https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcr...

JUSTICE KAGAN: Yeah, so I don't think that a court did it over there, and I think that that's my concern, is I can imagine a world where you're right that none of this stuff gets protection. And, you know, every other industry has to internalize the costs of its conduct. Why is it that the tech industry gets a pass? A little bit unclear.

On the other hand, I mean, we're a court. We really don't know about these things. You know, these are not like the nine greatest experts on the Internet. (Laughter.)

JUSTICE KAGAN: And I don't have to -- I don't have to accept all Ms. Blatt's "the sky is falling" stuff to accept something about, boy, there is a lot of uncertainty about going the way you would have us go, in part, just because of the difficulty of drawing lines in this area and just because of the fact that, once we go with you, all of a sudden we're finding that Google isn't protected. And maybe Congress should want that system, but isn't that something for Congress to do, not the Court?

freejazz18• 3 years ago

That wouldn't resolve the question as to whether or not the laws conflict and to what extent they do...

swatcoder• 3 years ago

To look for an upside to the worst case scenario, the biggest win from a deep challenge to Section 230 protections would be a return to a smaller and more mindfully curated web.

Many of the problems from social media are rooted in the idea of having such enormous hoards of content that the only way to trawl through it is with automated algorithms. This was great when it worked, but the content pool seems to grow faster than algorithm design can accomodate and will only get worse as AI content generators mature.

It suggests that there are possibly as few as two futures:

1. The internet is a wasteland of content pollution and the automated tools for sorting and sifting through it are overwhelmed with toxic waste.

2. The internet returns to a network of trust where people are individually, but only marginally, accountable for what they share with others and this accountability engenders thoughtful curation at a manageable scale.

It might be that modern equivalents of web rings, curated directories, group chats, and member forums supplant "Internet Scale" search engines and social media networks. It would be an adjustment, but it wouldn't be the end of the world.

kmeisthax• 3 years ago

In scenario #2 the toxic waste still exists. Unmoderated forums are protected against liability even if CDA 230 is repealed. So 4chan will still be around.

Furthermore, distributing liability among your users is not a great idea. What will happen is that extortion enterprises will be created to sue people on our hypothetical old-web-of-trust. We know this because BitTorrent allowed Prenda Law to make porn, share it themselves to dox users[0], and then sue the people who downloaded or watched it. This scheme worked because copyright lawsuits are expensive to defend against, and defamation is no different. So everyone just quickly settled, which is why it took years for judges to catch onto this particular fraudster.

The only thing that keeps you from being sued for watching an infringing YouTube video is DMCA 512, which works almost[1] identically to CDA 230. Because it's a large centralized service, it's a juicier target, and people with legitimate copyright grievances can get things taken down from them. So nobody bothers to try and sue individual viewers.

Your #2 scenario only works if the Supreme Court is merciful and only kills recommendation systems. If CDA 230 is struck down entirely, you won't get to run a network-of-trust version of the web, because just hosting a public web server will require signing an indemnification agreement and posting a very large bond. In this scenario the Internet becomes more like cable, or perhaps a games console.

[0] Normally an IP address is not dox; but a lawyer and an out-of-order DMCA subpoena can turn it into dox.

[1] 512 adds a notice-and-takedown regime because Hollywood wanted censorship powers over the Internet.

pixl975• 3 years ago

What about #3 that no one talks about?

3. Some other country tells the US to fuck off and foots a lot of the lost advertizing bill in order to collect a shit ton of user data like the big US sites do now?

It's a world wide web, if the US screws off too much there is no golden rule that says it has to be the monetary king of the internet.

not2b• 3 years ago

Based on reporting of the oral arguments, it seems to show that the Supreme Court understands that they don't understand (other than Alito, perhaps), are worried about breaking the whole thing, and will probably do nothing and issue a ruling saying that if changes are needed it's Congress's job to do it.

See for example https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/02/brett-kavanaugh-...

russellbeattie• 3 years ago

A legitimate result from this lawsuit would be to simply force internet companies to be more responsive. The family in question did everything they could to alert Google to the extreme content, and were completely ignored. I think anyone who has had their user ID mistakenly flagged, or app removed, or content stolen can relate to the unresponsiveness of internet companies to legitimate user complaints. It's what is driving the sense of arrogance people get from these companies, who act as though they are untouchable.

There needs to be some accountability. The "slippery slope" or "chilling effect" arguments are valid, but the scale has tipped too far so that individuals being harmed by these companies have little to no recourse.

These companies make billions of dollars in profit and much of that is because they underfund customer support, or simply ignore it all together. It's like any consumer product safety issue. It's expensive, but should be a required cost of doing business, like product recalls or EPA pollution regulations.

jenkstom• 3 years ago

I'm done with wired magazine. They no longer produce content, they produce drama. That article about how there's no point in identifying evil people because there's no evidence supporting it was massively harmful to people in abusive relationships who are trying to sort out why they are suffering so much and what evil really is. From the comments below this one apparently is clickbait. I'm done.

pyuser5832• 3 years ago

Most people don’t.

The US Supreme Court doesn’t understand the internet

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