Section 230 Made the Internet Possible, But Is No Longer Serving Humanity

Prelude to a longer post about why Section 230 should be repealed and amended.

Artwork by Banksy

One of the major findings I have discovered in my 5+ years studying and writing about the intersection of tech, law, and society, is that “the global internet” is an illusion. We tend to speak of the “internet” as a global, public common good, but that is the illusion.

We could call it the “American Internet”, but even that expression is inaccurate since the internet has little to do with American history, tradition, way of thinking, and culture. Without veering into identity politics and muddy waters, it’s confirmable that the internet we use today was created by a tiny, socioeconomically privileged group of people in America, typically white males in their twenties and thirties, who were typically educated at top universities such as Harvard, Stanford, Yale, MIT, and UCLA. The internet must presumably reflect what this group of people value the most, you know, instant gratification, status games, convenience, constant entertainment, aesthetically and materialistically pleasing things, and information with shock value.

Today, the internet is governed and controlled by what we call “BigTech”, a group of five-to-seven privately-owned, international conglomerates with market caps that exceed the GDP of almost all countries except the US, China, and the EU if we count it as a single market. These companies are all US-based, and that is not a coincidence. The US market is much richer, freer, and less regulated than other places on the planet - an enabling business environment that has proven to be great for innovation. On the downside, antitrust laws were not being enforced during the company’s hockey stick growth journeys, as the American internet became the world’s internet. It created a “winner-takes-all” market dynamic, where the big fish grew bigger by eating the smaller fish, indefinitely. As a result, BigTech are now far more powerful and politically influential than they should be, especially since they don’t have to abide by the same democratic and bureaucratic constraints and norms as freely elected governments are required to. As I see it, the Trump administration is a symptom of this development. BigTech’s growing political and economic power, have catalyzed a shift in the US from a public governance model to a private imperialist model, championed by BigTech and now adopted by Trump.

Trump Will Run the US Government Like a BigTech Company

The defining trait of the internet today is insincerity. I am not just thinking of how possible it is to fake having a seamless life on Instagram, pretending to be in a relationship with a model on OnlyFans or Character.AI, scamming someone into buying a course through TikTok, or posing as an expert on whatever is trendy on LinkedIn. The internet seems to relish in insincerity, but my point is deeper than that.

What I mean by insincerity is that the internet will give you a radically different experience depending on where you are based and on who you are. Except it doesn’t care about who you are as person, but offers a differential treatment based on the stereotype it perceives you fit into. Your experience on the internet - the news, media, and advertisement you are exposed to - will be radically different if you are young or old, male or female, interested in sports or music, located in Ohio or Zimbabwe. Either we call this kind of personalization smart business, because if every user experience is uniquely customized to the individual, you can’t go wrong. Or we call it insincere, because treating people based on fake perceptions of who they are may serve their needs superficially, but it moves people further away from each other on a humane level.

The BigTech sector owns most of the internet’s infrastructure (hardware, software, and physical infrastructure), but it doesn’t control much of the day-to-day operation. That is automatically carried out by algorithms, what we call “predictive AI”. This type of AI is categorically different from ChatGPT-like generative AI, but arguably more influential. Even though we never see it or think about it as users, it runs in the background of all our interactions with the internet. Recommender systems on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, X, YouTube, Netflix, Google, Amazon, personalizes our online experience. Because our experiences are tailored to our personalities by the algorithms, it’s convenient to think that the algorithms are value-neutral and bias-free. This misconception finds a legal basis in an American law from 1996 that have been interpreted by courts to mean that algorithms are immune from publisher liability.