Launch a small website and commit a felony in 7 states and 13 countries.
I wouldn't have known about the Mississippi bill unless I'd read this. How are we have to know?
But yeah, this definitely sounds like a business opportunity for services or hosts.
Regulatory capture in real time!
The US doesn’t have 50 different cultures with totally different values, but probably has like… 7.
Source: am from Kansas City.
Same goes for other countries as well. It’s insane.
Yes! Make a union of states! How should we call that? States Union... Union of States... United States! Yeah, that should work.
Websites don't have to be a business or be related to one.
I think it's going to happen one way or another and the most peaceful way to do it would be sooner rather than later.
What would you have preferred? Of course you'd prefer if the law never existed in the first place, but I don't see having a third party auditor verify compliance is any worse than say, letting the government audit it. We don't think it's "regulatory capture" to let private firms audit companies' books, for instance.
Source: am from St. Louis.
I suppose this is what confused me then, as it seemed obvious that e.g. the Facebook reccomendation algorithm isn't speech, so if a social media site would be considered speech it would be due to the user content. Section 230 doesn't in any way supercede the constitution, but it does clarify which party is doing the speech and thus where the first ammendment would apply.
No, it immunizes certain parties from being held automatically liable (without separate proof that they knew of the content, as applies to mere distributors [0]), the "publisher or speaker" standard being the standard for such liability (known as publisher liability.)
It doesn't "clarify" (or have any bearing on) where the First Amendment would apply. (In fact, its only relevant when the First Amendment protection doesn't apply, since otherwise there would be no liability to address.)
[0] subsequent case law has also held that Section 230 has the effect of also insulating the parties it covers against distributor liability where that would otherwise apply, as well, but the language of the law was deliberately targeted at the basis for publisher liability.
At some point it makes more sense to pass such a law at the federal level since we end up there eventually either way.
Expecting laws to instead propagate from neighbor to neighbor as I accidentally suggested—this wasn’t what I meant to suggest, but in defense of the idea:
> At some point it makes more sense to pass such a law at the federal level since we end up there eventually either way.
I do think there still could be some value. Laws could propagate across states that are more receptive to them, and then people can see if they work or not. Porting Masshealth to the whole country at once seems to have been a little bumpy. If it has instead been rolled out to the rest of New England, NY, then down to Pennsylvania… might have gone a little smoother.
If anything, communications between Mississippi and California would be interstate commerce and would thus fall under federal legal jurisdiction.
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* See UDHR articles 12, 18, 19, and 20. This is not an issue limited to the provincial laws of one small country.
† Unless the site operators also use of the site, in which case they too do suffer it; this is in my experience virtually always the case with the noncommercial sites that it is most important to protect.
Welcome back to the 90s and the PGP, Clipper chip, warez, and DeCSS days.
At some point, they will have outlawed enough things that most people want, that most people will become outlaws.
If I run a server in Utah primarily for myself, and you as a Californian happen to stumble upon it, should I have to abide by California privacy laws?
* The First Amendment generally prohibits the government from enacting any laws or regulations that limit speech based on its content (anything you might reasonably call "moderation" would definitely fall into this category!).
* Private companies are not the government. Social media networks are therefore not obligated to follow the First Amendment. (Although there is a decent argument that Trump's social media network is a state actor here and is therefore constitutionally unable to, say, ban anybody from the network.)
* Recommendation algorithms of social media networks are protected speech of those companies. The government cannot generally enact a law that regulate these algorithms, and several courts have already struck down laws that attempted to do so.
* §230 means that user-generated speech is not treated as speech of these companies. This prevents you from winning a suit against them for hosting speech you think injures you (think things like defamation).
* §230 also eliminates the liability of these companies for their moderation or lack thereof.
There remains the interesting question as to whether or not companies can be held liable via their own speech that occurs as a result of the recommendation algorithms of user-generated content. This is somewhat difficult to see litigated because it seems everybody who tries to do a challenge case here instead tries to argue that §230 in its entirety is somehow wrong, and the court rather bluntly telling them that they're only interested in the narrow question doesn't seem to be able to get them to change tactics. (See e.g. the recent SCOTUS case which was thrown out essentially for this reason rather than deciding the question).
People who are not “the speaker or publisher” for liability purposes have Constitutional first amendment free speech rights in their decision to interact with content, this includes distributors, consumers, people who otherwise have all the characteristics of a “speaker of publisher” but are statutorily relieved of liability as one so as to enable them to make certain editorial decisions over use generated content without instantly becoming fully liable for every bit of that content, etc., yeah.
And arguing the alternative is you making the exact inversion of statute and Constitution I predicted and which you denied, that is, thinking Section 230 could remove First Amendment coverage from something it would have covered without that enactment.
> should I have to abide by California privacy laws?
It seems these are the conditions:
As of January 1, 2023, your business must comply with both the CCPA and the CPRA if you do business in California and meet any one of the following conditions:
* Earned $25 million in gross annual revenue as of January 1 from the previous calendar year
* Annually buys, sells, or shares the personal information of 100,000 or more California consumers or households
* Derived 50% or more of your gross annual revenue from the selling or sharing of personal information
Also lots of states have their own data privacy laws.
https://iapp.org/media/pdf/resource_center/State_Comp_Privac...
And yes, in this particular circumstance for this specific law as currently written a private blog doing it's own normal things probably wouldn't infringe or be subject to these rules.
But what about a Utah focused social media site that does have $25M in revenue? It's not trying to court California users. Why should they have to be liable to laws in a state they never intended to do business in? It's these Californians leaving California to interact with an org across state lines. Whatever happened to state sovereignty? Should an Oklahoman be required to buy only 3.2% beer in Texas as well or have some Texas beer and wine shop face the wrath of Oklahoma courts for serving an Okie some real beer?
Where did that web transaction actually happen? On the client or on the server? Where did the data actually get stored and processed?
IMO we're past the time of patchwork laws. The social experiment of figuring out what makes some sense is largely over at least for the basics. It's time for real federal privacy laws to make a real, enforceable nationwide policy.
> It's not trying to court California users.
The point that is being made, is that even a site generally designed and expected to be used by Utah citizens can become liable to Californian law because a Californian created an account.
You don’t need to know all the laws of Mississippi to serve such customer, or any laws from anywhere else other than Italy.
If I operate a healthcare facility in New Mexico and a Texan comes in asking an addition, should I be liable to Texas abortion laws? Should they be held liable for an abortion that happened out of the state?
Capitalism at its best. We have a definite problem with over-regulation and a judicial system that isn't coping nor keeping up. Capitalism, instead of fixing the problem, makes a business model out of it.
Capitalism: Why fix it when you can make money of it.
And if you don't do business in the US there is only so much the US can do. Most importantly it can ask ISPs in the US to block your site. As they do for copyright infringement routinely.
We have all accepted that our countries block copyright violations originating from outside their jurisdiction.
But of course this is a disaster for the free internet. While copyright laws are relatively uniform world wide, so if you respect it locally you're probably mostly fine everywhere, incoming regulation like age verification and limits on social media use, or harassment stuff, is anything but uniform.
To some degree this is also maybe more shocking to people in the US, as the US norms have de facto been the internets norms so far. It is, in any case, not entirely new:
"When Germany came after BME for "endangering the youth" and demanded that I make changes to the site to comply with German law, my response was to simply not visit Germany again (and I'm a German citizen). When the US started to pressure us, we moved all of our servers and presence out of the country and backed off on plans to live in the US. No changes were ever made to the site, and no images were ever removed — if anything, the pressure made me push those areas even more."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMEzine
How do we deal with the fact that we don't have a global mechanism for agreeing (socially and legally) on necessary regulations, whilemaintaining the social good that is a truly global internet?
And if the police has reason to suspect that there is illegal gambling happening at your dinner party they can obtain a warrant to bust your party.
Hell even if your party is to loud and annoys the neighbours the police can and will shut it down.
If social media sites are shut down but I am free to post my opinions on my personal blog site, how is my freedom of speech affected?
Did I not have freedom of speech before social media existed?
Is there an implication in freedom of speech that any speech facilitating service that can be offered must be allowed to operate? That's at least not obvious to me.
I echo what others said: There are good reasons to oppose all this, but blanket cries of "free speech" without any substance don't exactly help.
With the internet it's a lot less clear cut. The user is requesting data from Italy, maybe, but is located in another jurisdiction. Add Cloudflare and the data might even be served from the US by a US company you asked to serve your illegal data.
It's becoming a shit show and is breaking up the global internet.
In some cases this arises in US Constitutional law as the freedom of other people to seek and encounter the speech, though I'm not sure if there's a formal name for the idea. (e.g. "Freedom of Hearing".)
They can order overflights to land to arrest you, if they so desire. They can also block you from the more-or-less all legitimate commerce globally with sanctions. And if they really don't like you, they can kill you without due process.
All of which the US has done to undesirables over the years, and can do again without any controls or checks or balances, to anyone globally.
At this point, I almost welcome all these laws. The more they restrict us, the more potential felons, but they can't fine and put us all in jail, no? Chronic over-legislation will crush from its own weight.
That said, like the saying of markets staying irrational longer than people can afford to, the realistic outcome is that bureaucracy will survive longer than a functioning society. Legislation will continue until morale improves.
Ideally, yes. I think the reality however will be that most "perpetrators" will be ignored, and anything else will be easy wins and collateral damage to small site operators that these regulators to happen to notice.
No cities are on fire and there aren't raiding parties crossing the border.
Sounds more like a... Confederation? of states. Or maybe... a Confederacy?
More like: look at the EU, extrapolate how it would look after a little more unification, and then take advantage of the fact that we’re made up of small states already that can group ourselves up as fits. Germany and France seem all-right, so we should organize ourselves into Germany and France size units.
Individuals are not meant to keep track, they're meant to leave the ecosystem. These types of bills are the end product of the process of regulatory capture by the corpos.
Corpos create centralized watering holes that are magnets for social problems, offering low effort service and very little accountability for early users. Corpos then nurture these uses because they drive engagement, and at the early stage any usage is good usage. When the wider public catches on and starts complaining, corpos then cast it as outside meddling and reject addressing the problems they're facilitating, as curation at scale would cost too much. Corpos then become a straightforwardly legible target for politicians to assert control over, demanding some kind of regulation of the problem. Corpos then lobby to make sure such laws are compatible with their business - like simply having to hire more bureaucrats to do compliance (which is the sine-qua-non of a corpo, in the first place). The last few steps can repeat a few cycles as legislation fails to work. But however long it takes, independent individual hosters/users are always left out of those discussions - being shunned by the politicians (individuals are hard to regulate at scale) and the corpos (individuals turn into startups, ie competition). Rinse and repeat.
In your mind, are these all filled with people who look the same, sound the same, practice the same religion, immigrated from the same place?
I am not sure that I have ever encountered anyone confused in the way you describe either...
The current legal reality is a shitshow but I don't think that's inherent to the situation itself. gTLDs and foreign hosting services certainly complicate things, but then so does choosing to (physically) import supplies from abroad. I'm not convinced there's a real issue there at least in theory.
I think that a single "common carrier" type treaty unambiguously placing all burden on the speaker and absolving any liability arising from jurisdictional differences would likely fix 90% of the current issues. If I visit a foreign run site and lie about my country of residence in order to access material that isn't legal where I reside the only liable party in that scenario should be me.
Shutting down a notebook factory for dodging sales tax is not a violation of the rights of would-be purchasers.
If you actually sell things to Californians that's different. At that point, yeah, I think you _should_ be subject to California law. You're doing the equivalent of mail order business with a resident after all.
You’ve come up with more reasons not to split up the country, by pointing out some ways the other parts of the country might have trouble.
I think (correct me if I’m wrong) you disagree with the partisan jab at the end, not the actual line of argument.
I wasn't thinking carefully enough because I've grown accustomed to such lines of argument being simultaneously partisan and irrelevant.
Except that in this case it's more like applying state sales taxes to online purchases. That has been a thing for years at this point.