Internet Providers Not Responsible

Discrimination is unacceptable but you can’t hold a website accountable for what people post. Pity poor Craigslist who is trying to police all listings but misses a few in the many hundreds of thousands if not millions they deal with. Government entities need to stop thinking of ISPs and other publishers as the ones propagating information and instead come to realize they are merely providing a forum for others to provide ads.

Excerpt:

Several Internet law experts said the suit seems likely to fail, citing a 1996 federal law that says an online service provider isn’t considered a publisher or a speaker when it merely passes along information provided by someone else.

Jennifer Rothman, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, called it "a complete nonstarter" despite legitimate concerns about discrimination.

"Congress decided it was more important not to chill speech on the Internet and not to shut down these Internet providers," she said. "If you start holding them responsible, essentially you shut down the business."

"From a moral standpoint, of course, people will expect that if you’re going to run a site like that you ought to police it," said Houston-based attorney Jeff Diamant. "But all Craigslist is doing is running a forum for people to communicate."

T1 Internet Provider
February 5, 2008 at 3:20 am
It goes without saying that for Web 2.0 sites it is almost impossible to monitor every single post in real time. But it should be more tightly moderated. Great article!
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