Reply #4 zebra's post
Hi!
I don't want too deep into the legality and try to answer your questions as best in the shortest and hopefully clearest way possible.
Hugh Grant got caught with a prostitute on Los Angeles. Sadly, I am old enough to remember when this happened. Yes, he was arrested because he was engaged in an illegal activity. Accepting an offer from a prostitute is illegal in California. Him being a celebrity, it is an entirely different public perception as opposed to the criminal penalty which is nominal.
US law enforcement monitors a lot more on than people realize. It is not just the federal government. on the state level, there are cybercrime units not just looking for sex trafficking but drugs, fencing goods, potential acts of violence, etc. A WG can get arrested for advertising on 141.com. However, it has to be worth it for law enforcement to chase her down. It is resource intensive to build a case. I am aware that in person cases at a physical location can take months to gather sufficient evidence to determine who to charge in the establishment. The time it takes to do the work reduces the possibility of error. Let's say if the WG turned out to not a WG but actually a man who robbed and murdered 5 men, obviously law enforcement will chase it down the best they can. The question is do they sledgehammer or scalpel their way through the Internet.
The federal government are involved in criminal and civil matters that are inter-state, international, military, immigration, federal recognized Native American Land (this one is very complicated), admiralty, intellectual property and patents, and criminal acts that the federal government deems under their jurisdiction. There are more than this but these are the big ones. The state and federal government can have overlapping criminal and civil statutes. The federal government can claim jurisdiction even thought there was a state arrest and charged under state law. Examples of this happening are hate crimes, terrorism, and trafficking of alcohol. You can be convicted on the federal level and the state can take up the case under state law and vice versa, if there is a jurisdiction.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 deregulated the United States telecommunications industry. The Internet did not look remotely what you see now. The telecommunication decency sections 230 and 231 were conceived in the era of limited-graphical messaging boards, UNIX based peer to peer messaging, AOL and CompuServe internet providers, etc. My UNIX based account ended about 4 years back when the provider went out of business. In the middle ages of computers, they were heavy desktops, a square 7 inch screen with 64 bit colors is considered large, a 486 processor, 512k graphics board, 1 MB RAM and a 40MB hard drive, plus operating system and word processor could cost you $3,000 or more. If you had a CD-ROM that added another $500. Your internet connection started at 1.2 kilobits per second to 56 kilobits per second and only through a regular copper phone line. (I am confident there are more than one of you knows what I am talking about waiting to download in JPG 8 bit graphical format because the GIF was too large.). Not surprising Congress’ concern was what was content kids could get at which is dangerous while not limiting people's ability to express themselves on the Internet. Internet predators are not new. I actual had one find me via a UNIX messaging board posing as someone else. The longer the chat went, I knew this was not going good places.
Platforms that serve commercial purpose for others is more complicated than just advertising. They self-monitor because of potential liability as it pertains to commercial transaction. Advertising is a form of free speech. Acting as an intermediary in a commercial transaction is different. Think of it as people coming to your home to sell things. Then you let the entire world to come into your home to buy stuff. A customer buys food from one of the sellers, eats it there and drops dead from the food. And, now there is a liability question, and the answer may change depending on changes to the scenario presented. Does any business want to test how much liability they may or may not have? Lawsuits and liability insurance are expensive. Not surprising, different commercial platforms are pushing for laws specifically for their industry to setup standards to protect themselves from liability.
Now, changing the facts, there is no commercial sale. You let people into your home. You can choose who and they just talk about whatever they want. Just to keep this simple, we will say they are not trying to sell people goods or services. You allow everyone in or the people you allowed in to speak to choose who to let into the house to see them. The often-quoted sentence from section 230 is "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 key words are “publisher or speaker”. In this example, the homeowner does not own nor speaks for those in the house talking. Therefore, since the homeowner does not own or speak the words then the homeowner is not responsible for the consequences caused by those words. This sounds like an absolute liability protection for the platform from what people say, and it has been tested and held up in courts thus far. But there are always new and different circumstances that will be tested in the courts and the platforms rather not test section 230 to discover under what circumstances in which they are liable. Interestingly, there are court challenges against platforms by those taking steps can a platform is taking to protect itself from potential liability (such as fact checking warnings, removing users, demonetizing, etc.).
These cases are civil cases against the platform provider for liability. Telecommunications by nature of crossing state lines and there is a federal law governing the industry, this places these civil cases in the federal court system. The United States’ federal and state civil systems is mostly based on the British legal system, except for Louisiana, which is French based civil courts. Every state does have differences in the criminal court system, it is generally consistent with each other and federal criminal court.
These are more words that I thought I would use. Hopefully, I am clear enough in context and application through analogy. | |
