Book, 26 words that created the internet by jeff kosseff. General housekeeping notes, week, for the first time will have our offer and two commentators reflect on this book followed by a question and answer session. Then about 1 30 p. M. , we shall have lunch and more conversation about these issues. Lets go to the subject matter today. Legislators and regulators work on a greater burden that facilitates intimate speech. Left and right receive whats treated as the publishers of the users speech. That means subject to all the rules that go for number publishers, its unknown but utperhaps very damaging effectsn speech or freedom of speech. Australia content, a recent law include jail social media executives, uk created social media regulator. They do not remove harmful content. This morning, parliament voted for antiterrorism bill which required requires them to act on reports of terrorist content within 60 minutes. As large of 4 of their revenue. Think about what that would mean for Large Companies in particular like google and facebook, its a lot of money but of course for Small Companies that might be evenng more damaging. Its increasingly seen as a simple solution to a wide variety of dangers, perhaps revealed by but not created by the internet. They have grappled with the harassment without suppressing Free Expression enough positive externalities thereof. There is, however a tendency, a temptation to treat these as novel political controversies or particular features of currently dominant speech platforms. In resolving them, create social itselfnd the internet and that brings us to our book today and our author, the 26 words that created the internet is a history and discussion of analysis of the struggles of the internet, the words that created the internet and the policy thereof. Our author, jeff kosseff is a cybersecurity law professor in the Naval Academy cyber science department. Privacy and First Amendment law. Judge leone of the United StatesDistrict Court of virginia. He was a technology and political journalist. He was a recipient of a george reward. We are eager to hear about your book. Thank you. Just a disclaimer, at the beginning of the talk, i am a professor at the Naval Academy. Thanks for coming but i do have to sayve that everything i say today is only on my behalf, and not on behalf of the Naval Academy. Now i can tell the story of how we got heree with internet regulation. It did not start with the internet. Think way back to 1956. This book was being sold at a new stand in l. A. I stand owned by 72yearold immigrant. This book is called sweeter than life, it does not have copyrig copyright. I can say it is not a very good book. I will read the first line, which is pretty much all im able to read. Beautiful legs under the dashboard. Lapd officer happened to be undercover at this stand and he read that and said this is a team. Mr. Smith was arrested and he was sentenced to 30 days in jail. He goes to the Supreme Court and they say his conviction has to be overturned because of the ordinance he was convicted of did not have any requirement, it didnt matter if he knew this book was, that he could go to jail regardless. Thats violating the First Amendment. We have this rule think the only way youst can hold them liable s if they know or should have known. All sorts of people who sell content created by others. Its a pretty easy rule until we get to the early 90s. We have services that my students hopefully remember, prodigy of America Online. Y it was first two big Online Services. There were two approaches to how they allowed users to interact. They let people post anything, they had no moderators or content policies. Prodigy on the a other hand, haa lot of policy, they contracted to moderators to delete objectionable content. In a few years, both of them ended up getting sued for defamation. The user posted about daniel, a guy played by him on wall street. The two results were very different. For copy, the case gets tossed out. The judge says its noub differt than the newsstand. Its just a distributor. Prodigy, on the other hand, is found to be a t publisher of the content. Prodigy took t steps to edit usr content, have moderation policies, all of that made it reliable as if it were the speaker. It creates this preserves affect were Online Services get they get more protection if they dont do anything. So thats where Congress Steps in. 1995, congress was going through this multiyear process to pass this act which eventually passed in 96. Most of the debate was about how to regulate local phone competencies companies, its pretty interesting when you looe back that thats what the debate was. There was this internet that was kind of percolating. There was a senator from nebraska and he was very concerned about his grandchildren seeing all of this content on my. So hee passed, he proposed something called the Communications Decency act. It basically said, imposed a lot of penalties on individuals and companies for transmitting certain types of materials to minors. That would have really made it very difficult for homeless things. Like information about diseases. There were a lot of First Amendment concerns. He got the Senate Version and on the house side, they are really concerned about this. There are Technology Civil liberties groups, Tech Companies like prodigy who say we dont want to do this. We are better positioned than the government to determine what is inappropriate for minors and our customers will vote with laws. So we have all of this objectionable material and we are not meeting the demands of the parent were subscribing. Theyre going to walk o away and vote with their wallets. So the solution was what became section 230, proposed by chris. Hes a moderate conservative congressman from orange county. Fairly liberal democrat from portland. They shared an interest in helping the Technology Industry to grow. They have a lot of technology preps but they also use empowerment. They proposed section 230. He said no provider or user of the Computer Services provided by another provider. If you dont know what that means, thats okay t because nobody then knew what it meant. There was no coverage of this in the news as it got attached paper eight, 1996 by president clinton. There is a lot of coverage because the other portion of thv bill also got past. So they ended up getting cast into cloth. The next year, the Supreme Court struck down the amendment. So all of that indecency, criminal penalties, that went away because they said it violates the First Amendment. So what you have left, which is buried in this massive, i think there were about 2000 pages, 26 words, a few exceptions for federal criminal law, electronic medications but theres not much more. Having gone through all of the newspaper clips, there was really no coverage of this. They didnt even know what to do with it. That changed the next year. This is all online. There was a man who was living a quiet life, selling real estate, living with his parents in seattle and suddenly starts getting a lot of phone calls. First every half hour, then multiple calls a minute saying really mean things to him. He doesnt know why. Then he gets reporters calling him. He found out that somebody, we still dont know who, posted on America Online, and advertisement for those marking the Oklahoma City bombing. This was after the bombing. I will repeat the exact terms but they were really crude jokes. He doesnt know what America Online is. So he calls America Online and they say okay, well take care of it and take it down. They delayed taking it down. When they did, on the other post gets put up. Hes begging them, writing letters to them, they are not doing anything about it. It takes weeks for this to get sorted out. Nn top of this, dj read the ad on air and read his phone number, which was in the attic. So hes getting all these calls and it eventually stops but he sues America Online. This lawsuit was filed in 1997. This is the first lawsuit seeking to hold an Online Platform liable. So americat. Online hires one of the best media lawyers in town. He knows about this section 230. He makes this argument that nobody thought to make before that those 26 words means that America Online is not responsible for anything its users post. His attorney said thats not the right reading. You need to look at that its not holding them to be the publisher or speaker. Its holding them to be the distributor. Once they noticed the post, they are reliable. He dismisses the case and it goes up to court circuit. Nobody really knows how this is because nobody really interpreted section 230. It goes to a panel that ended up having judge wilkinson to write this opinion that basically says section 230, the 26 words are what they are. You cant hold these platforms when reliable at all. We feel for you but this is the choice congress made. We are going to dismiss the case. So the first ruling is basically what almost every other federal courts interpretation of section 230 rests on. They all i say in so many opin opinions, we feel really bad for you but thats basically the law of the land. So i spent a lot of time with those who are generous with their time. I talked with me and one thing that impressed me as they both seemed to know the nuances of the law. The commentary says this is not what the law was intended for. But chris said some interpretations have concerned him. So i asked him what was most concerning. He immediately respond with theo worst word hateful. I think this illustrates this section. So he was an attorney who had just moved to north carolina. She was representing Art Galleries and museums and she needed some work done, a friend a handyman. Hire the handyman does some work, is not happy with the work. He wanted her to market a script to one of her clients and she didnt want to do it. It wasnt a great situation. But he, for whatever reason senc an email to the Museum Security network which is dedicated to helping recover stolen artwork. She right, i justhe did some wok in north carolina, i think she said she washt descended from a nazi, might have been hendrix granddaughter. So strong implication of what set saying, what she says, i represent Art Galleries. I never claimed to be descendent of any nazis but the owner gets the email she gets the email, he makes some changes to it and she posted online on the website as well as the list. Her life gets ruined quickly. Shee loosed she loses a lot of clients. She sues and what the circuit does, there was a bit of history but section 230 does protect someone like the Museum Security even if they made the affirmative choice to forward it on to their users. So i think that probably illustrates the big house sweeping. I spent time speaking with her, she has a lot of insightful thoughts and she does not agree with section 230. Then i asked her, do you think this is what caused your harm . She paused for a second and see said no, she was in the netherlands. She had no idea what section 230 west. I wont say exactly what she said but she said people are going to be a, you can fill in the rest of the words. I think i was pretty insightful. We look at section 230 mcc a lot of debate about what the platforms are doing. The platforms are not doing enough to moderate. It also needs to be clear, theres not going to be a perfect solution. No matter what you do unless you ban all content, some are going to get it. The other side is that the internet under section 230, i believe has held up a mirror to say this is what we look like. There are some bad people who will do bad things. You might defame someone make these claims and when someone bites. We like have revenge pornography. Sex trafficking online. Congress ended up amending that for that. Harassment of all kinds. Section 230 does allow platforms to take a handsoff approach and i would say thats allowed by law but also not necessarily what section 230 was intended for. I view it as being a contract between congress and the platform saying the platforms are better than the federal government regulating content. We want them to take care of this. Its a muchin more obligated answer about how they are doing. They are doing stuff. And not doing enough. If you look at the debate in congress right now, i think section 230 may well be limited, i think a lot of it is based on this information. A lot of it is based on arrogance over many years for many Tech Companies. I think if this fully repealed, i would like to know the next step. I think theres not really a good answer to that. If its repealed, the modern internet is built on section 230. We have almost all of our largest websites relying on user content. I dont think theyng would be ae to exist in their current forms if we did not have section 230. That may be good or bad depending on your preferences. It would be a radical change and we need to have a social discussion about how we want the internet to look. When i first proposed the book, it was called the 26 words that shaped the internet. I changed it because i think the 26 words created the internet. They created the social structure that we know today. Orr i think it would look very different and again, if thats something we want as a society, its finee but we need to have n informed discussion about this. Anyone who tells you theres an easy answer to solving this has about the questions because i can tell you, theres not an easy answer. There are a lot of equities and tradeoffs. I hope it will help to inform this discussion and figure out how we want to take the internet in the future. [applause] there you go with allll that complication. Everyone knows there are no real policy problems, its just bad people making bad policy. First commentator will be alonzo, the center for democracy and technology Free Expression concept which supports Internet Users freedom of expression. The project works on any subject including human trafficking. Counterterrorism and radicalizing content and online harassment. The legislative and activity in the United States of the eu and responsible for a great part of the world. Focuses on protecting rights, freedom of expression after serving Liability Protections. The project works to develop content policies, best practices with internet contentnt and advocates for user empowerment tools. Government regulation of online speech. She earned a ba in anthropology and that will turn out later. A ba in anthropology for the university of delaware. We look forward to your comment. Thank you for that kind introduction. And thank you for a remarkable book. It has been in d. C. For about ten years, on intermediary issues, weve seen a lot of different sections over the years and the way it functions in court cases, we often talk about it being as important as the firstom amendment. My organization has a deep history with section 230. Our founder makes a couple of appearances in jeffs. Book in 1994, he and some t of the othes in the Digital Rights here were excited to find senators to work with on creating what these 26 words would be. I dont know that even then anybody had quite the vision of the internet that we would have in ten years time let alone the internet we have today. There was one thing i really drew from jeffs book discussing the creation of the law, what led to it and how it was interpreted by courts in the first ten years or so, there was something of a common vision for what was it that people, governments, companies were trying to achieve with section 230. What kind of internet are we aiming toward . There were cases of prodigy that showed that traditional armaments are potentially going sto lead to adverse outcomes, confusing results were operators who did the job trying to moderate speech, put it more at risk. That seemed to dis incentivize the kind of pro social content moderation, keeping discussions on topic, dealing with harassment or unproductive comments that they wanted to see early on. We have section 230, there are many more than 26 words, theres a pretty substantial finding and policyon section of the front of the statute. The drafts of the laws really articulate the vision for what is going to mean for the u. S. And the world. It talks about things like being the most selfdirected access to information that people have ever really had. The policy of the u. S. Seems to be supporting that free open internet firms really putting choice in peoples hands as to what they access and what they get to share. This vision that sounds kind of simple but it was kind of a clear vision but i think was both overtly shaping the policy debates in the early days of the internet and it was taken up in a variety of international forms, we see similar questions coming up in europe and countries around the world, intermediary discussion and what it should be. It was a great effort to product. The technical intermediary or a Search Engine or lead posting company, if they say its a legal risk for other people, the most sensible option is to shut that down. There are incentives of hosting free speech by third parties, often who arent even paying you for the privileges pretty well. Theres this strong embrace of this recognition of the world they play in really and embrace the sense of legal risk for the gatekeepers with a wrong direction to go. But as we, some of the cases that started defining the outer boundaries started complication of this discussion. When you think about, jeff talks about the website, the dirty, sort of w