A forthcoming decision from the U.S. Supreme Court could have massive ramifications for legal liabilities regarding the internet, possibly resulting in a wave of legal threats against companies like Google.
As of Tuesday, the Court is now hearing oral arguments in the case of Gonzalez v. Google. The family of Nohemi Gonzalez is suing YouTube, the massively popular video-sharing site and a subsidiary of Google, after the 23-year-old college exchange student was gunned down by ISIS-affiliated gunmen in a Paris restaurant in late 2015.
The family has argued that YouTube’s recommendation algorithm surfacing ISIS content effectively acted as a recruitment tool for the terrorist group, violating U.S. law.
The SCOTUS decision in the case would impact the fate of Section 230, a provision to U.S. law passed in 1996 that protects internet platforms from legal culpability related to the content that individuals share on them. Google has argued that the provision applies to this situation, while the Gonzalez family has countered that it should not apply to recommendation algorithms.
The law has also become a major sticking point for lawmakers on both ends of the political spectrum, with each keen to revise it in different ways and enact more hands-on regulation of digital content.
Democrats, like President Joe Biden, have argued that the law allows internet companies to dodge responsibility for hosting hateful and dangerous content.
Republicans, like former President Donald Trump and his supporters in Congress, have argued that the companies remove too much content and that they have done so with an alleged, but unproven, bias against conservatives.
Halimah DeLaine Prado, Google’s general counsel, told The Washington Post that the SCOTUS review of the case would put the company and others at greater risk of costly legal battles, threatening the health of technological and business growth.
“It goes beyond just Google,” DeLaine Prado said. “It really does impact the notion of American innovation.”
Speaking at a press briefing, Mary B. McCord, the executive director for the Georgetown Law Center Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, said that it was unlikely that lawmakers could have foreseen the extent to which internet platforms could be abused when they drafted Section 230 in the ’90s.
“It’s implausible to think that Congress could have been thinking to cut off civil liability completely…for people who are victims of terrorism at the same time they were passing renewed and expanded legal authorities to combat terrorism,” McCord said, according to the Post.
The Post also spoke to Jeff Kosseff, a cybersecurity law professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, who argued that giving the government too much control over internet content regulation could backfire.
“Once you give up power to the government over speech, you’re not getting it back,” Kosseff said in the Post article.
While the Supreme Court could refine the interpretation of Section 230, only Congress maintains the ability to repeal or alter it. Several such proposals have been put forward, though none have yet been passed.
Newsweek reached out to other experts on the internet and the law surrounding it for more insight.
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