These are the 4 realistic outcomes of getting rid of section 230 protections which say: no interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher.
Option 1: every post must be vetted and manually approved by mods. For a big site, not doable.
Option 2: everyone must register with real id and they are all responsible for what they posted. Doable, and goodbye anonymity. Dictators wet dream. Welcome thought police.
Option 3: Say fuck it and close shop, get rid of all user content.
Option 4: stop doing business in the us, host all servers, all infrastructure, register everything in foreign countries.
This is what they are all begging for. Complete fucking idiocy. 230 is the only reason we can have a forum like this. It's the only reason you are allowed to post on someone else's site. Unless of course if you want to just use foreign companies servers.
The problem is they are now a publisher so they are liable for having published it, doesn't matter who wrote it.
If the NY Times publishes a story by Michael Parsons that says Donald Trump is a transsexual hooker, the NY Times gets sued as the distributed the story, and maybe Michael too.
Weird, but now the point is visible, thank you.
Does US law know about the thing named intention?
Or in US a publisher by definition have full rights, authority and means to check any article before publishing and definitely know if it is truth or lie?
I dunno, the whole thing would have to be rethought if they took out 230 because the internet doesn't work without it.
Internet does not limited to conventional websites with known owner and jurisdiction. So, it is not about internet, but only about modern HTTP(S) based WWW.
I think that in any case modern web have to be destroyed. It's not even about all that googles, facebooks, censorship and other political and social stuff, it is about complete degeneration of HTML/CSS/JS crap in the way of complexity and taking control on information from the user. Browsers now is a overblown corporations tools for spying on users and not the programs just for displaying hypertext pages. May be it will be not so bad as it seems to be. People could eventually find a different, better way to communicate avoiding big brother corporations.