Opponents The antitrust push against Big Tech has lobbied for all sorts of arguments to try to weaken support for the new law. They may have found a sticky one in the end.
This week, a group of four Democratic senators, led by Brian Schatz of Hawaii, sent a letter to Amy Klobuchar asking her to address the issue. America’s Online Choice and Innovation Act. The bill, which was co-responded by Klobuchar with bipartisan support, would ban the biggest tech companies from abusing their power to the detriment of businesses that operate on their platforms. But Schatz’s team argues that a terrible side effect is buried in the law. The bill, they claim, would prevent dominant platforms from enforcing their content policies, thus “adding harmful content online and making it harder to fight it”.
Here’s what the bill says about content moderation: nothing. The relevant section states that a “covered platform” — such as Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta, or Microsoft — cannot “discriminate in the application or enforcement of the covered platform’s terms of service.” danger between similarly located business users in a way that would materially harm competition. ” This does not appear to prohibit or limit content policies. On the contrary, it suggests that platforms may continue to enforce their terms of service—just not in a discriminatory way. In its face, this means that a dominant platform cannot unfairly apply its rules against a company that relies on it to reach customers. For example, if a new video-sharing app is taking market share from YouTube, this provision will prevent Google from selectively invoking some of the less frequently used policies to ban the app from its app store. .
If the bill doesn’t discuss content moderation, where do some people get the idea that it will affect it anyway? In part, it’s a point worth mentioning from an industry that isn’t afraid to do creative reasoning to beat the proposed regulations. But those in the tech industry aren’t the only ones making this claim. Last week, law professors Jane Bambauer and Anupam Chander published an option to join washington articles give many of the same warnings. On Wednesday, Chander, who teaches at Georgetown, guided me through the debate. See what happened to Parler, the conservative-friendly “free speech” Twitter alternative. Last year, after the January 6 riots, Apple and Google forbidden Parler from their app stores and Amazon AWS canceled its hosting contract. Parler sued but had no legal leg to stand on. (It eventually implemented a content policy and was allowed back into app stores.) Under the new bill, however, a conservative state attorney general, like Ken Paxton of Texas, would be able to sue the platforms, alleging that they discriminate against Parler because of its conservative affiliation.
Okay, but can’t companies then just say, “But this Not distinguish. This is the policy they violated, and this is proof that they violated it”? Not so quickly, Chander argued. It doesn’t really matter what Google or Amazon says; What matters is what a federal judge, and ultimately the Supreme Court, decides. And many Republican-appointed federal judges may agree that tech companies are mistreating conservatives.
“Content moderation decisions are not clear-cut decisions,” says Chander. “It’s easy to see those judgments as discriminatory, especially when you have judges who feel that their side is the one being discriminated against.” He added, “Boy, you’re giving the conservative judges on these courts a preloaded weapon, knowing they’ll be supported by all the conservative Supreme Court justices.” .”
