Regulating Platforms. Terry Flew. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Terry Flew
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
Серия:
Жанр произведения: Кинематограф, театр
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781509537099
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broadcast media. This was not simply a matter of pragmatics – decentralized networks are inherently more difficult to regulate than centralized ones – but a fundamental philosophical choice. For de Sola Pool, the new networks or electronic communications required a ‘policy of freedom’ and ‘freedom from government’:

      Such a ‘policy of freedom’ would be enabled by the perceived plasticity of the medium itself. Unlike broadcast technologies, digital media were seen as being fundamentally shaped by their user communities. The internet pioneer Vinton Cerf argued that ‘the Internet can be anything we can imagine and program it to be. It is a most malleable and evolving infrastructure … With such plasticity, it is how we think about the Internet that matters … The Internet evolves in response to forces acting on it’ (Cerf, 1996, p. ix).

      This should not be taken as a sign that internet theorists were necessarily conservative or neoliberal. While some authors were clearly in favour of the free market (Rossetto, 1996), others saw the internet’s roots in anti-market movements associated with the New Left in the 1960s. For example, Mark Poster connected the ‘second media age’ of the internet to postmodernism (Poster, 1994), while Howard Rheingold (1994) envisaged a new communitarianism and a revitalization of the public sphere around digital culture.

      One of the most powerful forces maintaining the Internet’s open, anarchic character, in sum, is our memory of all the romantic stories about the Internet; those stories taught us to expect the Internet to be liberating and unpredictable, and that expectation helps keep it that way. The Internet is open, not because of the technology itself or some uniquely democratic potential hidden inside the technology, but because we have narrated it as open and, as a consequence, have embraced and constructed it as open. (Streeter, 2011, p. 175)

      Although the CDA was signed into law by President Clinton, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Electronic Frontiers Foundation (EFF), and other bodies had the legislation struck down in district court, in June 1996 in Pennsylvania, on the grounds that it was a threat to freedom of speech, which was constitutionally guaranteed under the First Amendment, and could have the consequence of ‘chilling’ lawful speech or conduct. In his concluding remarks striking down the legislation, Judge Dalzell argued for the distinctiveness of the internet as a uniquely speech-enhancing medium: in his view, the internet’s seeming chaos and cacophony of speech were in fact its greatest assets, so that to restrict them in response to concerns about pornography or offensive speech was like ‘burning down the global village to roast the pig’. Rather than viewing the internet as a communications medium, Dalzell described it as ‘a never-ending worldwide conversation’ and claimed that, ‘as the most participatory form of mass speech yet developed, the Internet deserves the highest protection from governmental intrusion’ (Judge Dalzell, quoted in Godwin, 1998, p. 289).

      The most enduring legacy of the CDA and of the manner in which it was struck down has been the separation of the legal obligations of companies that primarily engage with the public through the internet from the legal obligations of organizations that are conceived of as media companies, in a more traditional sense. The ‘safe harbor’ provisions enshrined in Section 230 of the CDA have given technology and social media companies considerable latitude over how they manage content hosted on their sites, without the liabilities associated with being publishers or media companies. It enshrines a distinction between the internet and ‘the media’ that has continued to prevail in discourses and policies related to the internet; and these are quite different from the original concerns about whether pornography or radical speech had constitutional protection under US law. The European Union’s e-Commence Directive, adopted by member states in 2000, followed the US model in setting clear limits to the liability of internet intermediaries for the content they host, although in practice the safe harbour provisions have been less clear in their application in Europe than in the United States (Keller, 2018).