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Comment by IBM | Hacker News Reader

Look any time anyone suggests a regulation this is always what everyone responds with. But this isn't even a new regulation, this would be the elimination of a freebie for the tech industry.

It'd be extremely easy to limit the impact of it by not eliminating the freebie for everyone, recognizing that there's societal value in enabling these online marketplaces.

Think Systematically Important Financial Institutions [1]. The "too big to fail" banks bear the toughest capital requirements, your local community bank doesn't. The same can be done for the tech industry.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemically_important_financi...

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Adding more regulation to one industry just because other industries have it is not sane policy making. One must consider how each operates as an independent system and think about all the implications when one tries to poke it.

Getting rid of platform immunity would result in massive censorship and decreased freedoms for the individual USERS of that service.

These platforms would just ban everything that is slightly controversial, on the off chance that they could be sued for it.

It is not about the rights of the companies that I care about. What I don't want is for this kind of massive censorship to happen to the users of these sites.

Immunity allows users to remain free and mostly unregulated. It is what makes the internet useful.

And I care about this issue, even though it would be "legal" for these companies to ban everything controversial, so please don't say "The 1st amendment protects you from the government, not private companiezzz!!"

Newsflash: the thing you're afraid of happening is already happening.

Google, Facebook, Amazon exercise editorial control of their platforms all the time. They delete spam, malware, porn. Just this week Google pulled right wing YouTube content as they moved to remove gun content [1]. They banned anything with the word "gun" in their shopping search [2]. These were never neutral platforms and they never pretended to be. The tech industry lobbyists cloak themselves in the language of free speech and liberty to avert regulation, but they have always been censoring content on their platform if it served their commercial interests.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-28/youtube-s...

[2] https://www.engadget.com/2018/02/27/google-gun-shopping-sear...

And your proposal, to hold them liable for content on their platform, would making things a hundred times worse, as they'd now take down more content because they are afraid of being sued for it.

It would certainly be great if the big tech companies engaged in less censorship. Which is why we need more policies that encourage them to be neutral platform, possibly like the utilities laws we have, instead of doing the opposite of making them more likely to take down content.

Lets move them towards being a more neutral platform with less or no editorial control. That would be wonderful.

> Lets move them towards being a more neutral platform with less or no editorial control. That would be wonderful.

Ugh, no. Editorial control and moderation makes the difference between a community and an open sewer.

But let's make sure we don't create such a liability that nobody wants to host user content at all. Because the easiest thing to do is to omit user content and focus exclusively on licensed, first-party, commercial content that has a contract associated with it. That doesn't create communities.

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