Ok but why? Because Google wants an internet strong & rich in content, where the world isn't afraid to share & bring their views online? Admittedly: there've been bad recent problems with bad actors manipulating platforms. But this still sounds like the good world to me. Supporting safe harbor, allowing new players to try to make their own communities.
A richer internet, with more service providers, not afraid to host speech is pro diversity. Google's benefit here is that they help the internet, the health of the internet is important to their business.
Everything here sounds like fundamental, sound, democratic principles that I believe strongly in. Cato is a well known libertarian organization, who naturally would advocate for indemnity, for safe harbor. To not have these sounds extremely perilous. Personally, Cato freaks me out in a number of places, but they're just talking basic, clear, good sense. Along-side another entity that wants to make sure the net is open & welcoming to new service-providers, not just left growing stale & ossified; Google knows that would be death for the internet. Section 230 feels like one of the only safeguards we have against that certain ossification, the final & forever take-over by the current big giants - the only ones with enough wealth to fund the proto-fascist censorship-first alternatives not having Section 230 would entail.
Google doesn't want an Internet strong and rich in content: All of it's actions have been in the direction of moving towards the AOL model. Absorbing all the content it can, not paying for any of it, and locking users into a first party model where they have complete control of ad placement, with heavy privacy invasion to ensure maximum profit is extracted. Google has, in fact, killed a lot of it's best sources. (see https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynet... for an example) It's no wonder HN posts frequently lament the loss in quality of results: Their sources are dead.
It's also important you understand what Section 230 actually does in practice: It provides immunity to a financial partner in illegal activity. Google partners (unwittingly, mind you) with scammers and fraudsters, and an incredible amount of malware distributors, in that it collects money to push their crimes out to a large audience. When the criminals get shut down... Google gets to keep the money. It's shielded from liability in it's participation in a crime. It'd be like if the money launderer couldn't be charged with anything after washing the bank robbers' money.
Rehab scams was an excellent niche example of where Google had multiple millions of dollars focused on an extremely profitable market, that was all fraudulent: https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/7/16257412/rehabs-near-me-go... (Exposure from this article eventually got it cracked down on... but guess who kept all the revenue...)
Of course, what this means in practice is: Tech companies like Google and Facebook have no risk in participation in crime, and hence, no incentive to shut them down. Google and Facebook could do a better job preventing abuse on their platforms, but while they'll make token efforts that cost them little, they have no real need to actually fix any problems here: The criminals make them money, and they get to keep it.
Fraud, malware, and scams make the Internet worse, and they directly harm billions of users. Unfortunately, the authors of Section 230 failed to account for the fact that platforms aren't just about speech, but about business, and billions of dollars traverse these platforms, entirely protected from any sort of liability.
> Google doesn't want an Internet strong and rich in content: All of it's actions have been in the direction of moving towards the AOL model. Absorbing all the content it can, not paying for any of it,
This is extremely apocalyptic scaremongering & I see no basis in factor for any of this. I see no basis-in-fact for fear of Google becoming a predominant content network, in subsuming media. Google links. They link outbound. Again and again and again. They are the hub that users trust to get to good content, but they don't profit from that content. Such an elementary & grevious mis-perspective as yours harms an assessment as to the real dangers at hand.
Your fear uncertainty & doubt grows only more misleading as we go through your post. Whatever secondary impacts Section 230 has, it's intended effects have been working effectively & to the benefit of both society & competition. Hosting speech online would not be possible without Section 230. Sites could be quickly overrun by dissent activity, forcing them to shut-down as desires. To insist that a site maintain 100% certainty that all hosted content was benign, safe, legal is to insist on authoritarianism. You can either have freedom or security. Your post, to me, shrills desperate alarms for security, but at no point do you acknowledge or accept any trade-offs, recognize what freedoms you consign to doom. Your ask insists on complete & total moderation systems, something few upstart companies could ever have hopes of achieving, and something that would cause countless outer voices to be expunged from the net immediately. Sites also require protection from their users, another huge facet of this article you've disregarded.
I'd like to see some actual clashes with the article. You've made a bunch of alarmist, freaked out accusations. But none have direct bearing on any of the worlds in this article. You've brought new points to bear that, to me, have few bearings on the moral certainty Cato here raise: your points aren't irrelevant, but the moral fabric of society depends far more on the ability to speak, to host, to create a rich, diverse society of views, than it is threatened by some shitty low-grade actions which aren't great, but honestly don't seem that important to me. Your claim that 230 creates a complete escape from liability also rings false to me, another shrill & hollow freak out, scream for alarm, when in fact the world is no where near as on fire as your pleas would claim. I think you do a misservice.
Posted by: Cato Institute
Written by: Staff at NetChoice, George Mason University
It is not coincidental every single one of these is paid by Google to publish material protecting Google's liability shield.