by Mike Masnik at techdirt
from the zuckerman-v.-zuckerberg dept
There’s a fascinating new lawsuit against Meta that includes a surprisingly novel interpretation of Section 230. If the court buys it, this interpretation could make the open web a lot more open, while chipping away at the centralized control of the biggest tech companies. And, yes, that could mean that the law (Section 230) that is wrongly called “a gift to big tech” might be a tool that undermines the dominance of some of those companies. But the lawsuit could be tripped up for any number of reasons, including a potentially consequential typo in the law that has been ignored for years.
Buckle in, this is a bit of a wild ride.
You would think with how much attention has been paid to Section 230 over the last few years (there’s an entire excellent book about it!), and how short the law is, that there would be little happening with the existing law that would take me by surprise. But the new Zuckerman v. Meta case filed on behalf of Ethan Zuckerman by the Knight First Amendment Institute has got my attention.
It’s presenting a fairly novel argument about a part of Section 230 that almost never comes up in lawsuits, but could create an interesting opportunity to enable all kinds of adversarial interoperability and middleware to do interesting (and hopefully useful) things that the big platforms have been using legal threats to shut down.
If the argument works,…
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