Can the internet be reclaimed from Big Tech?

0:01Vito Emanuel:NPR.

0:11The Indicator Team:This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Adrian Ma. For decades, there's been this popular idea about the Internet, and social media in particular, that they're sort of like a digital town square, a place where people can gather, share ideas, dialogue and debate. And in this view of the Internet, Facebook, YouTube, and X aren't just machines for spreading memes and misinformation. They're platforms for exercising that most hallowed of American rights, the right to free speech. And it's an alluring idea because it gives a sort of noble justification for all the messiness that we see online.

0:46The Indicator Team:But if you were to ask Olivier Sylvain, this view of the Internet as the sacred zone for free speech is really a myth. and one that's doing us more harm than good. These are not passive, neutral conduits, right?

1:01Vito Emanuel:These are entities that are making decisions about content delivery, but they can never be held accountable for it.

1:07The Indicator Team:Olivier is a professor at Fordham Law School who studies communications and information law. He recently published a book called Reclaiming the Internet, How Big Tech Took Control and How We Can Take It Back. Today on the show, he lays out his argument for why he thinks a libertarian myth of the internet has given big tech too much power, and the changes he'd like to see to give some of that power back to the people.

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2:45The Indicator Team:As Olivier Sylvain tells it, the 1990s were a really idealistic time for the early Internet.

2:52Vito Emanuel:You see people writing about how the Internet would displace governments and allow people, users, end users, finally govern themselves. You no longer had to rely on a publisher to distribute the ideas. You can go to an electronic bulletin board to find news and not have to worry about the editors at a newspaper. So there was something about what was happening on the Internet in the 1990s that felt especially liberatory. And that's where the libertarian idea sets in. It's this notion that governments are getting in the way.

3:29The Indicator Team:This skepticism towards government's regulation of the Internet was also on display in the courts. In 1997, the Supreme Court heard a case called Reno v. ACLU. It involved a law that Congress passed called the Communications Decency Act. And this law had a lot of parts to it. And one in particular was called Section 223, which criminalized the knowing transmission of content that was, quote, obscene or indecent. Now, the ACLU argued this language was way too broad and violated the First Amendment. and the justices unanimously agreed. They ruled in favor of the ACLU and most of the law, including that section, was struck down.

4:11Vito Emanuel:Arguing that the internet is a platform for all people to be pamphleteers, where everyone can be a town crier. And it's an argument against government regulation of the online space. So this is something that is permeating the culture and there's real resistance to the idea that government can have any say in how information traverses the Internet.

4:36The Indicator Team:And that resistance was also evident in another part of that law, which actually remains intact to this day. Say it with me if you know it. Section 230. As we've talked about before, courts have interpreted Section 230 as giving Internet companies broad immunity for content that's posted by their users.

4:55Vito Emanuel:And the reason is because if companies had to be careful about all the content that is passing through their servers, they would never go into business. And so advocates in Congress pushed for an immunity, a provision that says you cannot hold these companies responsible for third-party content.

5:14The Indicator Team:And this immunity helped the Internet as we know it flourish. It flung open the doors for the creation of vast social networks and apps that let people hail rides from strangers and rent out their apartments to strangers. And without companies having to be worried about being sued into oblivion from what their users say on their sites. But the problem was that this immunity also meant these tech platforms wouldn't face legal consequences if its users spread misinformation or hate speech or content that encourages risky behavior or even self-harm.

5:51Vito Emanuel:You know, economists use the language of externalities, right? These are companies that never internalize the externalities of their distribution of content.

6:01The Indicator Team:In other words, the companies reap the upside, but they're almost entirely insulated against the downside.

6:07Vito Emanuel:So polarizing content, even if it holds people's attention, is not something these companies worry about to the extent that it's harmful to society. or discriminatory content, right? The delivery of ads to particular people based on protected categories like gender or age or race. That too is something that companies have said they are not responsible for.

6:27The Indicator Team:For years, companies have successfully used Section 230 as a shield from liability for these kinds of harms. Olivier argues this immunity, along with the persistent idea that these are just platforms for free speech, has given big tech too much power. And in his book, he argues that certain changes are needed if consumers are going to take some of that power back. For one thing, he says, we as a society have to let go of the notion that social media is just a digital town square, that they're simply platforms where users can express their free speech rights.

7:02Vito Emanuel:To say that these are platforms, first of all, is a head fake. It's misdirection. Um, platform connotes to me, and I think the term itself connotes a kind of neutral facilitator for the, you know, articulation of some event or something, think of a stage or something like that. Um, it's a, it's a powerful metaphor, but the companies that are blasting your messages out to the world are not simple platforms. These are companies that engineer the online experience. And this is not about free speech, but about optimizing their bottom line.

7:40The Indicator Team:In short, these companies are in the business of harvesting our data and selling our attention to advertisers. And this more cold-eyed view of tech companies seems to be gaining traction lately, not just in public opinion, but also in the courts. As we recently covered on the show, juries in California and New Mexico found Meta and Google liable for designing products that were addictive and failed to protect minors. On top of taking a more skeptical stance, though, Olivier argues we also need a set of economy-wide legal reforms that rein in the business model for these companies. And he says we should start with Section 230.

8:18Vito Emanuel:First, I would like to see a narrowing of the legal protection under Section 230. One that at least makes it clear that companies are responsible when they know that their services are causing harm.

8:32The Indicator Team:Second, he says, we need some new data protection laws.

8:35Vito Emanuel:There is no comprehensive data protection law in the United States. California famously has a protection for its residents, but the United States doesn't in the way, say, the EU does or Brazil does or even China. does, right? I would like to see that.

8:50The Indicator Team:Specifically, he'd like to see limits on how companies are allowed to collect and use our data and also require companies to be more transparent about the algorithms that they use to target content. Olivier thinks changes like these would help correct for some of the power imbalance between, say, social media companies and their users, but it would also affect our approach to another world-changing technology, AI. And in this way, he says, today feels a lot like the 1990s.

9:21Vito Emanuel:There are very similar arguments that proponents of the technology are making about regulation. They're advancing a libertarian view. That is to say, any regulation of AI will get in the way of innovation and competitiveness, and some even say in the way of expressive free speech rights. They're saying this even as people are witnessing consumer harms.

9:46The Indicator Team:In other words, we've been down this road before. From the early days of the Internet, many of us were convinced that it would be the great democratizer, something that distributed power rather than concentrated it. Now, Olivier says he's worried that we might be in danger of making the same mistake. This episode was produced by Angel Carreras and engineered by Kweisi Lee. It was fact-checked by Vito Emanuel. Kicking Canada is our editor and the indicators of production of NPR.

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