EOTO #3

 Sherman Anti-Trust Act and Section 230

    When looking at policies that affect the way we consume media, especially on the internet, it is very important to know and understand what the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 and Section 230 mean for the internet, media, and information. 

    The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 was designed to simply stop monopolies. This would be done by either breaking up existing monopolies or preventing future ones from forming. The law explicitly, "prohibits activities that restrict interstate commerce and competition in the marketplace." Congress has stated that they do view and treat the media differently under this Act and hold it to a different standard. 

    A case went before the Supreme Court in 1945 known as Associated Press v. United States. The Associated Press is a news organization and the Court found that Sherman Act prohibited the AP from putting various limits on new members in addition to also prohibiting the AP to sell news to non-members. The Court made this decision because they wanted to preserve the concept of "marketplace of ideas" which is basically the teaching that all views deserve a seat at the table and to deprive that is a form of censorship that the first amendment protects again. 

    Looking at the Sherman Act and the concepts the Court has presented through Associated Press v. United States, we can look at just how relevant and important these laws are today when examining the media in a modern context. The Sherman Act still protects against monopolies from staying or forming, an issue we can see right now when it comes to just a handful of companies controlling almost all of the news out there. We can see how the "marketplace of ideas" is under attack from big tech. Whether it be prominent conservative voices being kicked off platforms, or perhaps shadow banning the Hunter Biden laptop story right before the 2020 election.

    Now we look to the other part of the lesson, what is Section 230, and what does it mean in the modern context? To define it Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 says that, "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." So Section 230 provides basic protections for people when they write something on the internet. For example there is no responsibility to those who write a blog or post a YouTube video, and what comments someone might leave on it etc. Those same protections are provided to the companies/platforms themselves.  

    There has been a growing movement from both those on the right and the left to repeal Section 230 for various reasons. For members of the conservative movement, such as Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, and others want to repeal Section 230 in response to growing amounts of online censorship from these tech giants and Section 230 currently provides them protection in the law. Hawley attempted an amendment to the Act back in June of 2019 called the Ending Support for Internet Censorship Act. This amendment would've removed big tech companies immunity to censor those unless they can provide proof that the reason for censorship wasn't based on discrimination against mainly conservative voices. 

    There are also calls to end Section 230 for those on the left too, but for very different reasons.  Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal from Connecticut wants to repeal Section 230 to end protections of online firearm sales. Blumenthal attempt to add The Accountability for Online Firearms Marketplaces Act of 2021. So we can boil down the two sides and their reasons to get rid of Section 230 being completely different. Conservatives want to end censorship protections for giant tech companies while progressives want to restrict even more speech and activity online including the selling of firearms. There have been calls from other Democrats to repeal Section 230 for allowing content that is deemed to be "cause damage and injury".