Actually, I think that hashing out the intent and reasonable/practical limits of a law based on its language is a job for the judicial branch, not Congress.

Laws didn't used to be massive 'we need to pass them to see what is in them' tomes. They used to be simple missives, written in everyday language, without umpteen dozen riders and special exemptions and funding stipulations and amendments and what-have-you. They used words and phrases like 'reasonable' or 'within reason,' rather than, 'a person shall be considered as belonging to Status B if they have retained Condition C for a length of time no less than 3 years but no more than 6, unless such a person can demonstrate Condition D...'

Judges used to have leeway in how they interpreted laws and applied sentences. Yes, it gave judges the power to give ridiculously short sentences and let their buddies/'our sort of people' get off scott free. And yes, it gave judges the power to give extremely heavy-handed sentences if they felt personally slighted. But they do those things today in our current system with minimal consequences, so I'd argue...so what?

I think that allowing people to act like people and reason like people is fundamental to any decent legal system. We can't try to make justice into some kind of an algorithm, because at the end of the day there's no reified reference for "Justice." There's just us.

> I think that hashing out the intent and reasonable/practical limits of a law based on its language is a job for the judicial branch, not Congress.

It is the job of the judicial branch to apply law (after the executive branch pursues lawbreakers).

But look at simple, clear, concise laws vs things like the US tax code (which is annoyingly precise in some places, yet ridiculously vague in so many others) - the simpler, clearer, and - often - shorter the law, the better for everyone involved.

This is because if a law is too vague, it is considered unconstitutional.

As part of due process, it should be clear from reading the law if I'm breaking it. I shouldn't have to guess and face years in prison if I happen to be wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagueness_doctrine

One thing very few people seem to notice is that this bill doesn't just jeopardise online services with it's broad language, it jeopardises users who are not the source of the targeted content. Why? Because they too lose the CDA safe harbor, and it's easy to look at the way modern information services look (especially, e.g., social networking sites) and see ways that an enterprising lawyer might target third party users as “publishers” of, e.g., information that is visible to some other users because the targeted user interacted with the source in a particular way.

Law has more options for interpretation. Often discussions on HN about laws will lead people to suggest 'tricks' or 'workarounds', though in the law space, judges are unlikely to side with such 'technical' responses.

Personally, I think the blanket immunity platforms have gives them little reason to do more than moderate for the type of community they want, they have no legal responsibility for what their platform becomes. I would be okay seeing more of them be legally responsible.

EDIT with more: Also consider that the basic concepts of law like intent for criminal law won't be done away with. Law is built around reasonable actions. SESTA will not radically make everyone operating a platform in breach of the law, it will simply mean they can no longer hide behind a blanket immunity. It will be possible to call into question whether or not a platform is doing "enough" or meeting a "reasonable" standard.

It's obvious why corporations are against SESTA: It's super nice to not have to worry about it, to simply say "we're immune to this type of case". Blanket immunity is good for the company, and it is logical for any tech company to be opposed to this change. But I don't think blanket immunity is the best scenario for everyone else.

I think the "you're committing three felonies a day because laws are overbroad" argument is incorrect and overblown. However, there are overbroad laws in specific areas that impose arbitrary injustices upon people who happen to come within their scope. Section 1001 (the "lying to the government" statute) is an example. It reaches a tremendous amount of conduct. It's cold comfort to someone in the crosshairs of a federal prosecutor that they may be able to prove that the misstatement on some random piece of paper that happens to be within federal jurisdiction is, in fact, a mistake and not an attempt to deceive the government. Until the Supreme Court reigned it in, the honest services fraud statute was also in that category.

Intent doesn't help. If you're at the point where there is a debate about your intent, you're already in a pretty deep hole. Intent is an expensive basis to defend yourself on (you pretty much have to go to trial because it's so fact-based) and there is no telling what a jury will think of your story.

Blanket immunity, on the other hand, is good. You can tell a prosecutor to sod off if you've got blanket immunity, because proving that you're in an immune category is something you can do easily and inexpensively, unlike proving that you didn't have the mental state needed for a crime.

This particular law has the potential to be the section 1001 or honest services statute for pretty much everyone operating a website that hosts user-generated content. It's terribly drafted, overbroad, and the mens rea requirement is too low. You should be very worried.

Blanket immunity "is good" if you're the tech company that may or may not be knowingly harboring sexual predators and human traffickers. Being able to "tell the prosecutor to sod off" is not, for everyone else, a good thing.

I get that blanket immunity is cheap, but when we're talking about companies which make hundreds of billions of dollars operating their platforms, with profits soaring so high they literally don't know what to spend it on, that we ask them to occasionally spend a little of it convincing the law they're doing enough to manage their platform?

Should platforms be managing themselves in that way, and is that better for everyone else?

With blanket immunity, law enforcement remains the responsibility of government agencies that (1) we pay to do those jobs, (2) have due process requirements, and (3) have broad immunity within the confines of their job. Without blanket immunity for platforms, we're requiring them to take on law enforcement responsibilities with none of the usual protections in place.

Banking secrecy and KYC laws are, I think, a great example of how consumer-hostile this can be.

The whole problem with Section 230 is that it is neutering our law enforcement's ability to do their jobs. Your statement is based on the presumption that these tech companies aren't in any way responsible for what happens on their platform. But you're forgetting a big thing: All of these platforms are monetized in some way. These companies profit off the criminal activity that occurs on their networks, in a big way. And even if they eventually shut down the criminal conduct, guess who walks away with all the money, scot-free?

Right now, tech companies have a perverse incentive to permit criminal activity. Changing the law would fix this. Consider that the reason banks have to prevent fraud is that they are responsible for fraudulent charges. Tech companies have no such responsibilities: They make money off everything, and aren't on the hook for anything.

Here's an example, there was an expose on The Verge about drug rehab fraud this month. You can find it here: https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/7/16257412/rehabs-near-me-go... and the followup here: https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/14/16309752/google-rehabs-ne...

Consider that in this example, Google makes as much as $230 per click. That's a lot of benefit for them to permit fraud, and there's more than enough information in the article to be sure that Google is definitely aware of the problem and that it continues despite their lackluster automated prevention attempts. Considering one rehab company says in the second article they spend "millions per year" on Google ads, we can probably conservatively guess that Google makes at least eight figures on this one particular brand of fraud. Google has no incentive to stop it, and they enjoy blanket immunity from responsibility for it.

Right now, the only jurisdiction with a say over these platforms appears to be the court of public opinion: Because bad press is the only thing that can encourage these companies to modify their behavior. Thanks to The Verge, Google is going to take reasonable steps, like having real humans verify the ads in this category in the future.

And they still walk away with all the money they made off of that fraud. Money that led people straight into these criminal enterprises rather than the legitimate search results below. At the very least, shouldn't the victims be able to come after the profits Google made on this enterprise?

> we're talking about companies which make hundreds of billions of dollars operating their platforms

No, we're talking about anybody that operates a website or app that allows someone else to post content to it.

Obviously blanket immunity is only good for those who operate web-services (and to some degree, everyone that uses those services.)

We want that immunity for good reason. If we are getting rid of that, we should make a good case for the value to be gained. Here, I don't see the argument being made clearly. The example website in the article is still being prosecuted. Why do we need this new law? Does this increase the potential penalties they face? Can't we just increase the penalties for those crimes?

edit: bad grammar