Law in the Internet Society

View   r7  >  r6  ...
EddyBrandtFirstEssay 7 - 31 Mar 2018 - Main.EbenMoglen
Line: 1 to 1
 
META TOPICPARENT name="FirstEssay"
Line: 29 to 29
 

Changed:
<
<
Your draft adequately introduces the issues, though the introduction to the introduction is too long; everything from Stratton Oakmont to the 2016 election can be put succinctly in three or four sentences.

You haven't shown why there is any argument for continued "safe harbor" immunity at all. The "infant industry" subsidy makes no sense with respect to companies strong enough to control elections and sway governments. They are media companies, equipped not only with their own First Amendment rights like the publishers with whom they compete, but with special immunities that others don't have. They can no longer claim that they don't edit or shape content; that's the source of immense market power for them. They can only depend on the idea, statutorily defined, that the user is "another content provider," just like themselves for all the difference it makes to section 230.

So the place to begin is: the Web was centralized by the platform companies based on an extraordinary subsidy to centralization of function without aggregation of responsibility. A range of bad social effects immediately followed. Now the platform companies ask that "self-regulation" be decreed for the perpetuation of the subsidy, for which no sufficient argument has been given unless one believes that they are not powerful enough already, and need dispensation from the requirements of the rule of law as it applies to everyone else. Capacious as the First Amendment's protections of the media are, they need more. Just as Mr Zuckerberg bought all the houses around his own because he needed more privacy, right?

I think the best route to improvement here is to take the bull by the horns and give the best case you can for offering the legal immunity subsidy to the companies as they are now. If you can do that, and the case is any good, you have a Hell of an essay, and Kevin Martin of Facebook has a job for you.

>
>
I don't know whether this was a response to my comments or another approach to revision. I do think that much good work went into a better introduction. If the best case for immunity, however, is some gas from Urs Gasser, that doesn't seem like a hell of an improvement over what you had before. The conclusion that says immunity has failed and we don't know what to do about that but if we don't talk about it we won't do anything is not the summing up of a strong case, either.

Perhaps the draft prefigures, then, the current state after Cambridge Analytica, in which everyone knows that the radical critics of the platforms (myself included), have been completely right, but—for a variety of reasons—people resist accepting that those who have been right about the problem all along also had the right solutions all along, too.

 


Revision 7r7 - 31 Mar 2018 - 14:37:22 - EbenMoglen
Revision 6r6 - 16 Jan 2018 - 05:59:16 - EddyBrandt
This site is powered by the TWiki collaboration platform.
All material on this collaboration platform is the property of the contributing authors.
All material marked as authored by Eben Moglen is available under the license terms CC-BY-SA version 4.
Syndicate this site RSSATOM