AUSTIN — Texas’ Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton filed an amicus brief yesterday urging the U.S. Supreme Court to radically narrow the scope of Section 230 protection for websites.
Paxton announced the filing through the official AG office website.
Paxton’s merits-stage amicus brief urges SCOTUS to reverse the Ninth Circuit’s decision in the Gonzalez v. Google case, a decision that upheld Google’s right to Section 230 protections in connection with its algorithm-generated recommendations.
“Enacted in 1996, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act was designed to provide ‘publishers’ narrow protections from defamation liability,” Paxton’s office’s statement explained. “However, the courts have misinterpreted the law and allowed it to become a nearly all-encompassing blanket protection for certain companies, specifically internet and Big Tech companies.”
According to the Republican AG, “boundless legal protections for these companies due to their perceived status as ‘publishers’ has heretofore prevented states from holding Big Tech accountable for numerous legal violations, even those that are unrelated to the publication of user content.”
The brief refers to “pornography” several times, asserting that “Congress enacted Section 230 as part of a broader statutory scheme to limit children’s access to internet pornography. Section 230 does that by allowing internet platforms to remove pornography (and similar content) without risk of being called to account for the content they fail to remove.”
Paxton also alleges that “the statutory history of Section 230 confirms the congressional intent to encourage Internet platforms to remove pornography and similar content, not to grant platforms government-like immunity for their own conduct. Supplementing legislation that criminalized the sharing of pornography, Section 230 gave Internet companies telephone-like liability protections, which allowed them to voluntarily remove pornography even as they carried countless other forms of content.”
The Republican AG contends that this was necessary because “an early-Internet judicial decision concluded that online platforms that remove any content become liable for all of it. Cases decided shortly after Section 230’s enactment, however, badly distorted this statutory framework, requiring this Court’s intervention.”