Online ownership needs new outline

Written into US law in 1996, section 230 of the Communications Decency Act was designed to protect internet companies from being sued out of existence for the behaviour of their users.

“The internet and other interactive computer services offer a forum for a true diversity of political discourse [and] intellectual activity,” it says. “The vibrant and competitive free market that currently exists for the internet” must be preserved.

The geeky utopians of the 1990s may not have reckoned, however, on the widespread use of the internet to facilitate crime and terror; or on the way it serves to narrow minds by creating i nformation bubbles; or on the way its economic and intellectual activity has come to be dominated by a few huge, wildly profitable intermediaries.

Those facts haunt section 230 because of one crucial sentence in the law: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

This provides — or rather, has been interpreted as providing — internet platforms with blanket protection from responsibility for content that appears on their sites, and indeed the offline criminal activities those sites facilitate.

Interpreted broadly, section 230 goes too far. Yes, it would be mad to prosecute a network provider for transmitting an e-mail that was part of a criminal conspiracy. But platforms that sell advertising alongside user-created content, profiting from it, take on some responsibility for it. And a platform designed specifically to make criminal activity harder to prosecute is surely a co-conspirator.

The time is right for a public discussion about the responsibilities of internet companies and how they should be held accountable.