Senate Democrats Are Circulating Plans for Government Takeover of the Internet: Reason Roundup

[Ubiquitous]

All your base are belong to us. A leaked memo circulating among
Senate Democrats contains a host of bonkers authoritarian proposals
for regulating digital platforms, purportedly as a way to get tough
on Russian bots and fake news. To save American trust in "our
institutions, democracy, free press, and markets," it suggests, we
need unprecedented and undemocratic government intervention into
online press and markets, including "comprehensive (GDPR-like) data
protection legislation" of the sort enacted in the E.U.

Titled "Potential Policy Proposals for Regulation of Social Media
and Technology Firms," the draft policy paperópenned by Sen. Mark
Warner and leaked by an unknown source to Axiosóthe paper starts out
by noting that Russians have long spread disinformation, including
when "the Soviets tried to spread 'fake news' denigrating Martin
Luther King" (here he fails to mention that the Americans in charge
at the time did the same). But NOW IT'S DIFFERENT, because
technology.

"Today's tools seem almost built for Russian disinformation
techniques," Warner opines. And the ones to come, he assures us,
will be even worse.

Here's how Warner is suggesting we deal:

Mandatory location verification. The paper suggests forcing social
media platforms to authenticate and disclose the geographic origin
of all user accounts or posts.

Mandatory identity verification: The paper suggests forcing social
media and tech platforms to authenticate user identities and only
allow "authentic" accounts ("inauthentic accounts not only pose
threats to our democratic process...but undermine the integrity of
digital markets"), with "failure to appropriately address
inauthentic account activity" punishable as "a violation of both SEC
disclosure rules and/or Section 5 of the [Federal Trade Commission]
Act."

Bot labeling: Warner's paper suggests forcing companies to somehow
label bots or be penalized (no word from Warner on how this is
remotely feasible)

Define popular tech as "essential facilities." These would be
subject to all sorts of heightened rules and controls, says the
paper, offering Google Maps as an example of the kinds of apps or
platforms that might count. "The law would not mandate that a
dominant provider offer the serve for free," writes Warner. "Rather,
it would be required to offer it on reasonable and non-
discriminatory terms" provided by the government.

Other proposals include more disclosure requirements for online
political speech, more spending to counter supposed cybersecurity
threats, more funding for the Federal Trade Commission, a
requirement that companies' algorithms can be audited by the feds
(and this data shared with universities and others), and a
requirement of "interoperability between dominant platforms."

The paper also suggests making it a rule that tech platforms above a
certain size must turn over internal data and processes to
"independent public interest researchers" so they can identify
potential "public health/addiction effects, anticompetitive
behavior, radicalization," scams, "user propagated misinformation,"
and harassmentódata that could be used to "inform actions by
regulators or Congress."

Andóof courseó these include further revisions to Section 230 of the
Communications Decency Act, recently amended by Congress to exclude
protections for prostitution-related content. A revision to Section
230 could provide the ability for users to demand takedowns of
certain sorts of content and hold platforms liable if they don't
abide, it says, while admitting that "attempting to distinguish
between true disinformation and legitimate satire could prove
difficult."

"The proposals in the paper are wide ranging and in some cases even
politically impossible, and raise almost as many questions as they
try to answer," suggested Mathew Ingram, putting it very mildly at
the Columbia Journalism Review.

--
Mike Godwin
"By all means cite GL if you think some Nazi comparison is baseless,
needlessly inflammatory or hyperbolic."
4:05 AM - June 24, 2018