>>>Each Companies ‘Terms Of Service’ (ToS) must be rational, nonpartisan and equally applied to all users, it is not.
Really? I’ve never heard that argument made persuasively. Milos Yiannapolous was banned from Twitter for participating in an incident of racially motivated harassment involving the actress Leslie Jones. Yiannapolous claimed he was being discriminated against for his conservative views. Even followers of radical Islam are allowed to post on Twitter, he claimed, and maybe that’s true, but as far as I know, he didn’t address the real question, which is whether followers of radical Islam are permitted to engage in racially motivated harassment.
I don’t know how many terms of service agreements you’ve read, I’ve read only a few excerpts myself, but I can’t believe that the framers don’t provide themselves with all the necessary latitude to use their own discretion in decisions to end service, and why shouldn’t they? When I deleted my Facebook account two years ago, I didn’t have to clear it with anyone.
>>> It’s time for Washington to remove that immunity and give Users back their power
Are you suggesting that users used to have more power than they do now? I remember something very different. What I remember, and this was less than 15 years ago,when I had something to say, I’d have to send a letter to the editor. It could only be a certain amount of words long, maybe 1200. The last time I did this, it was by email, and after about two weeks, I’d get a call from the paper, asking me to affirm that I had sent the letter in. A couple of weeks later a considerably redacted version of my letter would appear in the local newspaper, where it would be read by maybe a few hundred people in my local community, and then discarded.
Fifteen years ago, most of these restrictions, which seem draconian now, were necessary because the technology and the existing market required everything published to go through a human editor. The fact that we can publish directly to the web now, not just words, but images and audio and the empowers the user, but it does alter the conditions of liability. If you make tech companies responsible for everything they publish, what you’re risking is making that human editor necessary once again as a legal gatekeeper, vastly slowing down and reducing access to the web for the whole public. That’s not going to add to anybody’s power.
