Digital Crossroads: Painful as slander may be, don't turn service providers into speech police

[Commentary] Although the Supreme Court struck down most of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, the Court let stand Section 230, which immunizes Internet service providers from being held liable for what their members post by stating that "no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." The section was designed to protect service providers -- at the time mostly dial-up services like AOL and Prodigy -- from prosecution under CDA for distributing content posted by their members. It's analogous to holding phone companies harmless for obscene phone calls made by their customers or shielding the post office from liability for illicit material sent through the mail. But Section 230 has also been used to protect social-networking companies and other Web sites with user-generated content whose business plans weren't even on the drawing board when the law was written back in the mid-'90s.