53support for the bill, crafted as an amendment to a massive
telecommunications reform bill then wending its way through
Congress. He brandished a blue three-ring binder contain-
ing printouts of explicit photos downloaded from the net,
where, he said, any kid with a dial-up connection could
find them. He opened the
binder and began read-
ing: “Erotica fetish. Nude
celebrities. Erotica bond-
age. ... Here’s a good one—
erotica cartoons.” Exon
shook his head.
The Senate passed his
amendment by a vote
of 86 to 14, and the net-
roots shifted their atten-
tion to the House of
Representatives, which
was working on its own
version of the telecommunications bill. When Speaker Newt
Gingrich went on TV and described Exon’s amendment as a
clear “violation of free speech,” cyberactivists rejoiced. In
August,Wiredput Gingrich on its cover.At the time, web lobbyists were still a rare breed in
Washington, and the CDA wasn’t their only headache. The
previous year, an anonymous user on a Prodigy bulletin board
had accused a freewheeling investment firm called Stratton
Oakmont (which was later the inspiration forThe Wolf of Wall
Street) of committing fraud. In response, the rowdy Long
Island-based business filed a libel suit against the online ser-
vice provider seeking $200million in damages. In May 1995,
Justice Stuart Ain of New York’s Supreme Court found that,
because Prodigy was using screening software to filter out
offensive language and moderators to enforce guidelines, it
was acting not as a passive carrier but rather in a manner akin
to a publisher. It could therefore be held liable for the defam-
atory language of its users.
A spasm of anxiety coursed through the web. Tech lob-
byists huddled with their allies in the nonprofit advocacy
world, who for months had been working with allies on the
Hill to come up with a less draconian regulatory frameworkto challenge Exon’s proposal. An idea took hold.
On June 30, two members of the House—Ron Wyden,
an Oregon Democrat, and Christopher Cox, a CaliforniaRepublican—introduced the Internet Freedom and Family
Empowerment Act. At the heart of it was a stipulation that
“no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall
be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information pro-
vided by another information content provider.” The bill also
contained a provision declaring that internet service provid-
ers couldn’t be held liable for “any action voluntarily taken in
good faith” to remove materials from their platforms.
Cox and Wyden told the media that their “good Samaritan”
amendment would give internet companies enough legal
breathing room to regulate their own communities with-
out fear of getting sued if something heinous inadvertently
slipped through. It would be a much more cost-effective way
of patrolling the net than the ham-fisted measures passed by
the Senate, they said. “Clearly, to guard the portals of cyber-
space, the private sector is in a far better position than the fed-
eral government,” Wyden told theWashington Post. On Aug. 4,
the House passed the amendment by a vote of 420 to 4.
When, months later, members of the House and the Senate
met to reconcile the differences between their bills, they
jammed Exon’s penalties and Cox and Wyden’s immunity
provisions into the final text, leaving it to the courts to sort
out the contradictions. On Feb. 8, 1996, President Bill Clinton
signed the whole package into law.“BIG TECH’S
FAVORITE DEFENSE
IS, ‘IT WASN’T ME. THE
ALGORITHM DID IT’ ”
Bloomberg Businessweek TECHLASH August 12, 2019