A court just blew up internet law because it thinks YouTube isn’t a website

theverge.com

15 points·Tomte··4 comments

> Social networks also aren’t allowed to ban users based on their location in Texas, a provision clearly meant to stop sites from simply pulling out of the state — which might be the simplest solution for many of them.

How does this work? Is Texas in a position to say a company can't NOT do business in Texas? Which amounts to saying if it does business in other states then it must also serve Texas. Doesn't seem like it would hold up.

Agreed. I can't understand how that's supposed to work: Texas citizens sue Facebook for not operating in their state, under Texas state laws?

Surely state laws and thus lawsuits based on them can only be applied to entities operating within those states.

Right?

> They are not websites,” Jones asserted of websites

Of course the judge in question (Edith Jones, Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit) is 73 years old.

And yet if you read her rationale in the article, a lot of modern, young and ostensibly technically aware people would agree with most of it. This is far more about politics than age, specifically about trying to classify social media platforms as service providers and common carriers, and strip them of Section 230 protection in order to allow government control over their speech.

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