Section 230’s rationale fails because today’s intermediaries are surveillance capitalists

Evidence

According to Senator Ron Wyden, Section 230 was intended to resolve that contradiction by encouraging internet companies to exercise some control over content without the risk of legal sanctions. The very first sentence of the statute mentions “protection for ‘good samaritan’ blocking and screening of offensive material.” What Wyden and his colleagues could not have anticipated, and still do not grasp, is that the logic of this early controversy no longer holds. Neither CompuServe nor Prodigy was a surveillance capitalist, but many of today’s internet intermediaries are committed to the pursuit of surveillance revenues. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 358

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: why the 1996 policy reasoning behind Section 230 is structurally outdated by the business model shift to surveillance — the statute legalizes a category of firm (intermediary) that no longer exists in its original form.
• XREF: connects to: Past policy tools fail against surveillance capitalism because they target obsolete problems — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 193

Broader Connections

• Past policy tools fail against surveillance capitalism because they target obsolete problems #expands (0.90) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 193