LOS ANGELES—A top executive for the telecommunications giant AT&T, in a blog post on the company’s website, on Monday called for the Federal Communications Commission to “reform” Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act — the law often described as the “First Amendment of the Internet.”
Section 230 protects internet platforms — such as Google or Facebook — from legal liability over content posted by users, which allows those platforms to provide an open forum for online communications without the impossible task of monitoring every piece of content that appears on their sites.
But the law has recently come under attack from both Republicans and Democrats, who for sometimes varying reasons say that the law allows platforms too much latitude.
The Trump administration has requested that the FCC “review” Section 230, which the adminsitration says is being abused by by online platforms that allegedly remove political speech with which they disagree.
But according to the co-author of Section 230, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, the law was never intended to force platforms to remain politically neutral. The purpose of the law was to protect free online speech of all stripes.
“You can have a liberal platform. You can have conservative platforms. And the way this is going to come about is not through government but through the marketplace, citizens making choices, people choosing to invest,” Wyden said in a 2019 interview with the tech news site ReCode. “This is not about neutrality.”
AT&T Executive Vice President of Regulatory & State External Affairs Joan Marsh wrote in her blog post that the debate over Section 230 is “the neutrality debate that really matters” — referring to the ongoing debate over net neutrality rules. But net neutrality is a separate debate, over whether telco providers like AT&T should be allowed to discriminate against traffic from some sites, while favoring traffic from others, such as sites that they, themselves, own.
Since the repeal of net neutrality rules in 2018, AT&T has repeatedly violated the principles of net neutrality — for example waiving data caps for subscribers who stream content from the HBO Max app, which is owned by AT&T.
In her blog post, Marsh notes that “five tech giants (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google) alone make up about 25% of the S&P 500 with valuations growing, even in a pandemic.”
But AT&T itself outranks all of those companies except Amazon and Apple on the current Fortune 500 list of the country’s most valuable corporations. While Amazon places second and Apple fouth, AT&T comes in ninth. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, ranks 11th, while Microsoft places 21st and Facebook 46th.
AT&T’s latest annual profit of nearly $14 billion were greater than Amazon’s $11.6 billion.
Photo By Brownings / Wikimedia Commons
