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EddyBrandtFirstEssay 7 - 31 Mar 2018 - Main.EbenMoglen
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META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstEssay" |
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< < | 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. | |
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