Broadly speaking, it means that if you use an Internet service to say something obscene or unlawful, then you, not the Internet service, are the one responsible for having said the thing, and the Internet service has legal immunity from whatever you said.
While the proposal leaves the core principle of Section 230 unaltered, it immediately applies a big honking qualifier.
That seems to mean that a service such as Twitter or Facebook would not be permitted to block users from sharing URLs to, for example, hate sites.
President Donald Trump himself has more than 86 million followers on Twitternot the most-followed account, but comfortably within the top 10. Stories from several organizations, including a recent Bloomberg cover story, find exactly the opposite, reporting that Facebook has instead worked to accommodate the Trump campaign and conservative outlets.
Nonetheless, Trump signed an executive order in May targeting online platforms. That order has a three-pronged approach, asking the Federal Communications Commission, Federal Trade Commission, and Department of Justice each to undertake some part of the enforcement.
Blake Reid, a professor of technology and telecom law at the University of Colorado at Boulder observed in a series of tweets that the proposal, as structured, doesn't particularly hold together as a legal argument.
Now, the House and Senate can take the draft legislation under consideration and probably do exactly nothing with it, just as Congress has done with the last several tech-related bills.
That said, however: Section 230 is now almost 25 years old, and the Internet has changed significantly since its adoption.
Original article