Court declines to hold edge providers liable for false third-party content posted on their sites, even if they know info is false

The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit has declined to hold edge providers liable for false third-party content posted on their sites, even if they know the information being posted is false. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! are not responsible for flooding the online search market with info on "scam" locksmiths, if the market has been so flooded, because such liability is barred by the Communications Decency Act, whose much-in-the-news Sec. 230 holds that the edge can't be treated as a publisher of third party content on their platforms. The Court said a complaint by 14 locksmith companies that edge providers had conspired to flood the market with scam search results was rightly dismissed by a lower court as barred by the Communications Decency Act. "As courts uniformly recognize, [Sec.] 230 immunizes internet services for third-party content that they publish, including false statements, against causes of action of all kinds," it said.