The stubborn, misguided myth that Internet platforms must be ‘neutral’

Lately, politicians and news sources have been repeating a persistent myth about, of all things, technology law. The myth concerns a provision of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, generally known as Section 230 or CDA 230. CDA 230 isn’t about neutrality. In fact, it explicitly encourages platforms to moderate and remove “offensive” user content. That leaves platform operators and users free to choose between the free-for-all on sites like 8chan and the tamer fare on sites like Pinterest. If platforms couldn’t enforce content policies while retaining immunity, communications today would look a lot like they did in 1965. We could passively consume the carefully vetted content created by big companies like NBC, and we could exchange our own views using common carriers like phone companies, but we wouldn’t have many options in between. That historical division between publishers and carriers is probably why many assume that “be a publisher or be neutral” must be the law on the Internet. There’s a lot of good stuff in the statute. Looking at what it actually says would help us move past today’s unproductive posturing and on to the serious policy discussions we deserve.

[Daphne Keller, the director of intermediary liability at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, is a former associate general counsel to Google.]