Let's take a pre-web TV show: American's Funniest Home Videos. That showed UGC to millions of people, allowing millions to propose their own (of course, the producers were the deciders, at least up to the point where the videos went on the air). So how is that show different from the websites you'd prohibit?
And here’s another difference: at least in my country, this programme was something that might be shown for an hour, maybe each day or maybe each week (it’s been a while, I don’t remember which one it was). There wasn’t a 24/7 channel that would show a steady stream of such videos without a pause - in other words, the show started, and ended. Twitter and Facebook never end.
As for comments/feedback: au contraire : A lot of those UGC shows had (or have) phone call-ins and phone voting, and piles of fan mail. The producers would gauge audience reaction and modify the selections accordingly.
But now it's much more efficient, unfortunately.
Let's take a pre-web example: Use of the early Internet was restricted to military, academic and later other institutions. Pre-1993, advertising was generally not permitted.^1 Were those rules legal problems.
1. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED350986
"ICANN", a secretive non-profit coporation with some very well-compensated staff, domiciled in the US, supposedly regulates "the Internet", at least in part. But no one can tell us where ICANN's "authority" comes from. Maybe acquiescence. I don't know.
When ICANN started handing out "domain names" in the early 1990s there was a rule that certain obscene strings could not be registered. Was that a legal problem. Later the restriction was inexplicably lifted. At first the registrations were free. Then they were $100. Then they were $50. All apparently arbitrary decision-making accepted without legal challenge. Where do these rules come from. Under what authority are they made. If ICANN had some rule about how websites can use "their" domain names, would that have been a legal problem.
The Internet has all manner of "rules" and "limits". Some may be technical in nature, but some are policy-based, at least in part. And those policies may come from a variety of non-governmental sources, including mysterious ones like ICANN. How can anyone challenge these "rules".
Let's say I want an IPv4 address block, but a "regional registry" says I am not allowed to receive one. How does this registry even have any authority to set rules and tell me I cannot have a block. Who "owns" the rights to network addresses. What legal recourse do I have when I am refused.
Whatever the answer, the fact is that there is an enormous amount of cooperation and acquiescence to restrictions imposed by sui generis "authorities" that goes into creating a single "Internet". And AFAIK these registries and other organisations like ICANN have few if any "legal problems".
Obviously the rulemaking is not only limited to made up "Internet authorities".
For example, Cloudflare can "kick a website off the internet". Cloudflare makes its own rules. The website may continue to publish via Tor or some other option, but the point is that most "rules" of the Internet are not found in any legal system.
Or how about when .org was going to be sold off to a shell company. Public protest stopped the sale. Although ICANN would have us believe they stopped it. Who "owns" .org. What are the rules. Who makes them. Can they be challenged through legal process.
Websites like Facebook and Twitter need the cooperation of many parties to do what they do.
The Internet, including the few mega-websites, operates according to cooperation and compliance with self-appointed "authorities" whose "rules" are generally never subjected to legal analysis.
In the rare cases where such "rules" are legally challenged, the defendants almost invariably settle to keep the novel issues out of the courts and retain their uniquely derived "power".
The other (no longer applicable) source of authority was the contract from the US Department of Commerce. This is no longer applicable, as the US government decided it did not need to be involved with this, especially because it got a lot of criticism for being involved, but the contract really offered the government no real control over ICANN.
The place where ICANN has the most say is domain names. Here ICANN acts as a full blown policy maker, in addition to running the naming IANA functions (like creation of the root zone file). To the extent that ICANN "regulates 'the Tnternet'", it is restricted to its policy setting over the DNS.
It is less easy to give any current source of authority for this without the commerce contract. But it really comes down to everybody accepting ICANN as the provider of the root zone file, and the fact that ICANN would reassign the TLD delegations to a different registry if a currently assigned registry does not want to follow its rules.
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The regional internet registries nominally get their authority to issue DNS address ranges from a delegation from the IANA (in its numbering function). Like mentioned before, one can trace ICANN's authority to run the numbering portion of the IANA back to being designated as the IANA by the Internet Architecture Board (part of the IETF), but this could be a little misleading, as the "numbering community" now exists, and ICANN claims that it is that community that would be allowed to appoint a new organization to run the IANA numbering functions.
(Also ICANN has created a stand alone nonprofit to actually run the IANA functions. This is a membership based non-profit with ICANN as the sole member, making it basically like a subsidiary without legally being one, because ICANN wanted to make it very clear that the operation of the IANA functions is separate from the policy making part of the organization once the Government contract was stopped.)
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Now perhaps you want to know how the IETF has authority? Quite simply, they are an outgrowth of, and assumed the functions of the Network Working Group, a group a early ARPANET researchers. As the group that defines protocols like TCP, IP, HTTP, etc they derive their authority from just that, that they develop the standards that underlie the internet.
Twitter and other Big Tech websites comprised of UGC and pointers to articles on newspaper websites have grown too large to moderate. Section 230 gives them immunity from lawsuits that the TV show does not have. The TV show has producers, actual people who make editorial decisions. Big Tech has people too but they hide their decision-making in "algorithms".
Gonzalez is probably going to change what Big Tech, i.e., mega-sized websites, can get away with under Section 230 immunity.
A website operator who wants to publish pages managed and edited by 150 of his "friends" would be acceptable.
A website operator who wants to hand out pages to 100,000 people would not be acceptable.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
https://arxiv.org/abs/1105.5170
https://arxiv.org/abs/1011.1547
https://pdodds.w3.uvm.edu/teaching/courses/2014-01UVM-303/ou...
https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/social-med...
If I was asked to "regulate" this problem of so-called "altmetrics", and the "attention economy" in general, here is how would I do it.
Twitter used to be based on SMS, but since 2020 it is just a gigantic website like Facebook. These two mega-sized websites are the primary sources of "altmetrics". If we take away the right to create these gigantic outsourced websites, what would happen.
I would place limits on websites that are comprised of so-called user-generated content. For example, if someone wants to run a website with millions of pages, they are free to do so. (If they could actually produce enough content to justify so many pages.) However, they are not free to have millions of different people author the pages. A website could not be a mass scale middleman (intermediaries) for people who wish to publish using the www. A mega-website doing no work to produce content, financed solely by selling people out to advertising could not, for example, supplant an organisation that employs journalists and editors to produce news.
By regulating creation of these mega-websites we could reduce the incentive for advertising. The mega-websites would lose their traffic and disappear. They would be replaced by normal-sized websites that cater to specific audiences.
Allowing a few websites to grow to enormous size while not having to do any work to produce content has been a mistake. Of course they can make billions in advertising revenue. It also allows any notion of egalitarianism in the www's design to be compromised in favour of a sharecropper model, so-called "platforms".
Without oversized websites no one would be able to publish their content to every website in existence. No website would be able to do zero work to create content and yet act as a middleman drawing massive traffic that can be monitised via advertising. That is what these mega-websites like Twitter and Facebook do. They sit between people who create content and people who consume it and sell these people out to advertisers.
The cost of publishing data/information to the www will continue to fall. The technology to make it easy will contnue to advance. We do need to be able to communicate in small groups, as we have always done. That is possible. We do not need to collectively use mega-websites with billions of pages run by a handful of third parties in order to do it. The follow-on effects of millions of people communicating via these third party websites are obviously harmful.