Even longer -- the Internet is older than the web, with the ARPANet and Usenet and BBSs and Fido and more before that. I remember using Usenet to do research, meaning getting citations that I could then take to an actual library to find the papers, before such things were readily available online.
The consumer has always been responsible for evaluating content and deciding what is or isn't reliable, credible, or true. Providers should absolutely clamp down on anybody committing fraud, but people should be allowed to be wrong on the Internet. No government should be able to regulate what counts as "the truth" (and the scarier word in that phrase is "the", in my opinion).
Now, private service (that is not protected from competition, i.e. is not a government-sanctioned monopoly) should be free to make its own rules, and be responsible for the consequences of those rules should they be applied indiscriminately. Nobody has a right to a Facebook or Twitter account, but if Facebook or Twitter want to control what's said on their platform, it seems to this non-lawyer that they're giving up the protections of "common carrier" laws, and if they get sued for gobs of money, that's their problem.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2021-07-19 01:21 (UTC)Even longer -- the Internet is older than the web, with the ARPANet and Usenet and BBSs and Fido and more before that. I remember using Usenet to do research, meaning getting citations that I could then take to an actual library to find the papers, before such things were readily available online.
The consumer has always been responsible for evaluating content and deciding what is or isn't reliable, credible, or true. Providers should absolutely clamp down on anybody committing fraud, but people should be allowed to be wrong on the Internet. No government should be able to regulate what counts as "the truth" (and the scarier word in that phrase is "the", in my opinion).
Now, private service (that is not protected from competition, i.e. is not a government-sanctioned monopoly) should be free to make its own rules, and be responsible for the consequences of those rules should they be applied indiscriminately. Nobody has a right to a Facebook or Twitter account, but if Facebook or Twitter want to control what's said on their platform, it seems to this non-lawyer that they're giving up the protections of "common carrier" laws, and if they get sued for gobs of money, that's their problem.