'Would Google collapse, and the internet be destroyed,' Justice Alito asked a Google attorney on Tuesday, 'if YouTube and therefore Google were potentially liable' for the content its users posted?
The Supreme Court is hearing a case that could change liability for some of the internet's largest media companies.
His question sought to explore what might really happen in a world where the Court rolls back a 27-year-old liability shield, allowing tech platforms to be sued over how they host and display videos, forum posts, and other user-generated content.
Understanding how the internet may work differently without Section 230 - or if the law is significantly narrowed - starts with one, simple concept: Shrinking the liability shield means exposing websites and internet users to more lawsuits.Virtually all of the potential consequences for the internet, both good and bad, flow from that single idea.
"The massive social media industry has grown up largely shielded from the courts and the normal development of a body of law. It is highly irregular for a global industry that wields staggering influence to be protected from judicial inquiry," wrote the Anti-Defamation League in a Supreme Court brief."Every other industry has to internalize the costs of its conduct," she said. "Why is it that the tech industry gets a pass? A little bit unclear.
The sheer volume of lawsuits could crush website owners or internet users that can't afford to fight court battles on multiple fronts, leading to the kind of business ripple effects Kavanaugh raised. That could include personal blogs with comment sections, or e-commerce sites that host product reviews. And the surviving websites would alter their behavior to avoid suffering the same fate.
In that interpretation of the law, Craigslist said in a Supreme Court brief it could be forced to stop letting users browse by geographic region or by categories such as "bikes," "boats" or "books," instead having to provide an "undifferentiated morass of information."
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