on balance I agree that section 230 does more good than it does harm; my life as a guy who runs this web site would be made quite a lot harder if it were to disappear! but also so many of the pro-230 arguments in this piece and elsewhere amount to "it's impossible to imagine the tech industry as currently constructed continuing to exist if section 230 is construed in a narrower fashion than it currently is, therefore section 230 must be construed as broadly as it currently is."
At the content layer, strict neutrality is often either incoherent or unimaginably awful. I happen to like a chronological feed, but if you follow thousands of people on Twitter, a strictly chronological feed is impossible to keep up with.
these are invented problems! twitter did away with the chronological feed to increase the number of tweets you saw, often specifically to show you tweets made by people who were paying to put them there. in so doing, they invented a justification to persist the non-chronological feed, by acculturating you to seeing people you had no relationship to on your feed all the time and incentivizing you to follow more people than you could keep up with, thereby letting them play more games with what you saw and turn it into more ways to make money.
It might be possible to imagine a YouTube without recommendations; it is not possible to imagine a Google Search without search results. Even worse, there’s not a sharp dividing line between search and recommendation; Google and Bing use lots of signals besides the user’s query (e.g., geographic location and search history). [...] A truly neutral search engine would have to rank every website the same, which is impossible, or use some kind of completely arbitrary criterion, like page size or alphabetical order. That doesn’t work.
first, it's very funny to invoke page size as a "completely arbitrary criterion" given that google already uses a proxy for page size as an input signal, and it was the supposed raison d'être for their big AMP push a couple years ago. (increasing page load speed causes people to view more web pages, which means they get served more ads from google's ad monopoly!)
second, the original ranking criteria for google search were simple enough that the most novel one could be published openly in an academic paper that every undergraduate computer science student of the early-mid 2000s learned about. before google, webcrawler was a direct spinout of research at a public university, and yahoo was for a long time a manually-curated list of links.
saying that -- because current web indexes are too complex/subtle/proprietary to describe openly, and it would be difficult to build one on a different mechanical foundation and have it compete on an even footing in the current market -- it's impossible to build one that's not this way, is ridiculous and ahistorical.
the field of cyberlaw needs people with better imaginations who aren't fascists.
