Thomas L. Knapp – Memphis Flyer

The Future of the Internet

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed, in its coming session, to hear an appeal in the case of Gonzalez v. Google. The case deals with one aspect of “the 26 words that created the internet” — Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

As is usually the case when Section 230 comes up, the pundit-media industrial complex goes into overdrive describing Section 230 as a “liability shield” that provides “immunity” for Big Tech. It isn’t a “liability shield,” nor does it provide “immunity,” except in the sense that you neither are “liable” for nor need “immunity” from prosecution over a crime you didn’t commit.

Here are the “26 words” in question:

“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

The important thing to understand about those 26 words is that they should have been condensed to 23 words that say the same thing:

“No provider or user of an interactive computer service IS the publisher or speaker of any information published or spoken by someone else.”

Today’s internet thrives on self-publishing platforms — social media like Twitter and Facebook, commenting services like Disqus, blog platforms like WordPress.

Those platforms are analogous to printing presses, which can be used by anyone to print anything, and are not analogous to newspapers or magazines where an editor pre-selects what content gets published.

If I sell you a hammer, I’m not the one who beats your spouse to death with it. If I sell you a car, I’m not the one who gets drunk and rams it into a tree. If I give you a printing press, I’m not the one who uses it to publish a Ku Klux Klan tract or a stack of revenge porn flyers.

Gonzalez v. Google takes that obvious fact of reality a little far afield. It’s not about who published what, but about Google subsidiary YouTube’s “recommendation algorithm.” The plaintiffs assert that because YouTube’s algorithm recommended recruitment videos for the Islamic State to viewers, Google is responsible for that organization’s 2015 terror attacks in Paris (in which a relative of the plaintiffs was killed).

But YouTube didn’t publish those videos. They just made a video “printing press” available to all comers, then used an algorithm to recommend videos particular viewers might be interested in watching. The makers of the videos made the videos. The people who were interested in the videos watched — and may have acted in response to — the videos.

Yes, YouTube helped make that possible but only in the same sense that a magazine running an ad for chain saws helps make it possible for some nitwit to bring a tree down on your house.

Attempting to unmake reality by repealing or undoing the effect of Section 230 won’t stop terrorism. It won’t keep us safe. It will just make us easier to muzzle.

The lower courts were correct in ruling against the Gonzalez v. Google plaintiffs. The Supreme Court should likewise recognize reality and put this vexatious lawsuit out of its misery.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

On May 8th, my wife and I pulled into a local gas station and filled the family car’s tank. It wasn’t intended as a smart move, nor did it result from a premonition. It was just dumb luck. Within 24 hours, we were driving past gas stations with yellow plastic bags over the pump handles and “no gas” signs at the lot entrances.

On May 7th — although they didn’t bother to tell us until a day later — Colonial Pipeline shut down 5,500 miles of pipeline, which normally carries almost half the gas sold on the U.S. east coast, due to a cyberattack. On the evening of May 9th, to take the edge off, the Biden administration declared an emergency covering 17 states, lifting restrictions on delivering gasoline by truck. No word on when the pipeline will resume operation.

For the last few years, as the price of electricity produced by sunlight and wind power has continued to drop, fossil fuel flacks have insistently informed us that the problem with solar and wind power is that they’re “intermittent and incapable of meeting our needs” (as Ron Stein puts it in Natural Gas Now, an online publication put out by, surprise, the natural gas lobby).

Well, they’re right to a degree: The sun only shines so many hours a day, and we can have cloudy days; the wind isn’t always blowing at sufficient speeds to turn turbines.

What we really need, they say, is reliable old coal, oil, and natural gas.

The fossil fuel advocates either ignore or minimize the progress of a third technology: large battery storage capacity. We’re getting better and better at generating the electricity when conditions are good, then delivering that electricity to your home (or from a home battery rig) when it’s needed.

Another thing the fossil fuel advocates ignore is just how vulnerable fossil fuels are to intermittency due to long and not-always-reliable supply chains. Pipeline or drilling rig accidents or attacks. Labor conflicts. Derailed trains or wrecked trucks. Suez Canal blockages. Wars, or warlike political embargoes or blockades.

“Intermittency” isn’t the only complaint we hear from the fossil fuel lobby, of course. They also like to complain about government subsidies to renewable energy sources like wind and solar.

I’m with them on that. But the thing is, they’re not with themselves on that.

Fossil fuels are by far the most government-subsidized energy form on Earth — everything from “steal that land via eminent domain so we can run a pipeline over it,” to “hey, could you pretty please send the U.S. Navy out to secure our tanker routes, take out a competitor, or scare a stubborn supplier?”

Then they throw a hissy if a renewable energy competitor gets special tax treatment on a new solar panel factory.

Coal, oil, maybe even natural gas are on their way out, even with the massive subsidies they’ve enjoyed for more than a century. Withdraw the subsidies — all of them, to everyone — and the market will likely make even shorter work of fossil fuels.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org).