Internet Regulation – DigitalKoans

"ISPs Tell Supreme Court They Don’t Want to Disconnect Users Accused of Piracy"

The Altice/Frontier/Lumen/Verizon brief [https://tinyurl.com/58yzp4z4]said the 4th Circuit ruling “imperils the future of the Internet” by “expos[ing] Internet service providers to massive liability if they do not carry out mass Internet evictions.” Cutting off a subscriber’s service would hurt other residents in a home “who did not infringe and may have no connection to the infringer,” they wrote.

The automated processes used by copyright holders to find infringement on peer-to-peer networks are “famously flawed,” ISPs wrote. Despite that, the appeals court’s “view of contributory infringement would force Internet service providers to cut off any subscriber after receiving allegations that some unknown person used the subscriber’s connection for copyright infringement,” the brief said.

https://tinyurl.com/2b5yw3m2

"Lawmakers Debate Ending Section 230 in Order to Save It"

E&C [House Energy and Commerce Committee] Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) and Ranking Member Frank Pallone (D-NJ) want to give Congress 18 months to come up with a new framework to replace Section 230 or risk losing it entirely. The idea is to force their colleagues to do something to change the law that’s been the subject of bipartisan ire for years. . . .

Republicans and Democrats often have very different ideas of how exactly the law should change. Republicans who support Section 230 reform often want platforms to have fewer protections for their content moderation decisions to combat what they see as censorship of conservative views, while Democrats who support reform tend to want platforms to moderate or remove more content, such as disinformation.

https://tinyurl.com/ykcf57ha

Paywall: "FCC Reinstates Net Neutrality, but It’s Not as Easy as It Once Was"

The Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 Thursday to put the internet back under “net neutrality” regulation, reprising Obama-era rules that prohibit internet service providers from discriminating against certain websites by throttling or blocking them. . . .

As the internet has proliferated, the question of precisely where it begins and ends has become murkier. Now, some mobile executives are arguing that an emerging 5G technology called "network slicing" should be considered to lie in the hazy realm beyond the internet’s borders, unconstrained by net neutrality.

The proposal has sparked controversy because these 5G "slices" are not just a small side show and may well be core to what the internet becomes in its next phase.

https://tinyurl.com/rheaejzk

"The Text File That Runs the Internet"

But robots.txt is not a legal document — and 30 years after its creation, it still relies on the good will of all parties involved. Disallowing a bot on your robots.txt page. . . sends a message, but it’s not going to stand up in court. Any crawler that wants to ignore robots.txt can simply do so, with little fear of repercussions. . . . As the AI companies continue to multiply, and their crawlers grow more unscrupulous, anyone wanting to sit out or wait out the AI takeover has to take on an endless game of whac-a-mole. . . . If AI is in fact the future of search, as Google and others have predicted, blocking AI crawlers could be a short-term win but a long-term disaster.

http://tinyurl.com/5n8s72bz

"Even If You Hate Both AI and Section 230, You Should Be Concerned about the Hawley/Blumenthal Bill to Remove 230 Protections from AI"

Considering that AI is currently being built into basically everything, this "exemption" [from Section 230] will basically eat the entire law, because increasingly all content produced online will involve "the use or provision" of generative AI, even if the content itself has nothing to do with the service provider.

In short, this bill doesn’t just strip 230 protections from AI output, in effect it strips 230 from any company that offers AI in its products. Which is basically a set of internet companies rapidly approaching "all of them."

https://tinyurl.com/ykjx8v4t

"EU’s New AI Law Targets Big Tech Companies but Is Probably Only Going to Harm the Smallest Ones"

In a bold stroke, the EU’s amended AI Act would ban American companies such as OpenAI, Amazon, Google, and IBM from providing API access to generative AI models. The amended act, voted out of committee on Thursday, would sanction American open-source developers and software distributors, such as GitHub, if unlicensed generative models became available in Europe. While the act includes open source exceptions for traditional machine learning models, it expressly forbids safe-harbor provisions for open source generative systems.

Any model made available in the EU, without first passing extensive, and expensive, licensing, would subject companies to massive fines of the greater of €20,000,000 or 4% of worldwide revenue.

(Quote from Technomancers.ai.)

https://bit.ly/3ociZwo

"Supreme Court Rules against Reexamining Section 230"

The Supreme Court has declined to consider reinterpreting foundational internet law Section 230, saying it wasn’t necessary for deciding the terrorism-related case Gonzalez v. Google. The ruling came alongside a separate but related ruling in Twitter v. Taamneh, where the court concluded that Twitter had not aided and abetted terrorism.

https://cutt.ly/Z6BKtx6

Paywall (with Some Free Views): "How the Supreme Court Ruling on Section 230 Could End Reddit as We Know It"

But another big issue is at stake that has received much less attention: depending on the outcome of the case, individual users of sites may suddenly be liable for run-of-the-mill content moderation. Many sites rely on users for community moderation to edit, shape, remove, and promote other users’ content online—think Reddit’s upvote, or changes to a Wikipedia page. What might happen if those users were forced to take on legal risk every time they made a content decision? . . . .

"Without Section 230, Wikipedia could not exist," says Jacob Rogers, associate general counsel at the Wikimedia Foundation.

bit.ly/3Ykiddn

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"Europe Prepares to Rewrite the Rules of the Internet"

Next week, a law takes effect that will change the internet forever—and make it much more difficult to be a tech giant. On November 1, the European Union’s Digital Markets Act comes into force, starting the clock on a process expected to force Amazon, Google, and Meta to make their platforms more open and interoperable in 2023. That could bring major changes to what people can do with their devices and apps, in a new reminder that Europe has regulated tech companies much more actively than the US.

https://cutt.ly/CNQPNS4

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"DNS Providers as Piracy Fighters? Enforcement Groups Weigh Options"

https://cutt.ly/fV1EG0y

"The World Intellectual Property Organization’s Advisory Committee on Enforcement recently heard how DNS providers have the ability to fight online piracy but could also face liability as secondary infringers. Veiled warnings like these are nothing new, but with piracy colossus Fmovies cited as a primary example, pressure on DNS entities is building once again."

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