The End Of Anonymous Comments?

Joe Lieberman, it seems, is looking to crank up the anti-terrorism volume a bit further. I would have thought that with Bin Laden killed we’d be heading in the other direction by now.

But a friend of mine in the GPO let me know that Lieberman is proposing an amendment to section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. That is the law that gives immunity to information content providers for the conduct of others. In other words, a blogger or forum host isn’t responsible for defamatory comments by anonymous commenters.

This amendment to that law would change that, by stripping out the immunity and leaving web hosts potentially liable. Yuck. A draft of the bill, apparently to be introduced tomorrow, is here: Section 230 Amendment The act as it stands now reads:

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 amendment reads (underline is an addition and strike through is a deletion in legislatureland):

No A provider or user of an interactive computer service shall may be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

The Senator calls this anti-terrorism legislation, in that if web hosts can be held accountable, they won’t let folks like the Taliban uses their services. This disrupts their communications.

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