You're mistaken as to what this ruling is about. Ultimately, when it comes right down to it, the Third Circuit is saying this (directed at social media companies):

"The speech is either wholly your speech or wholly someone else's. You can't have it both ways."

Either they get to act as a common carrier (telephone companies are not liable for what you say on a phone call because it is wholly your own speech and they are merely carrying it) or they act as a publisher (liable for everything said on their platforms because they are exercising editorial control via algorithm). If this ruling is upheld by the Supreme Court, then they will have to choose:

* Either claim the safe harbour protections afforded to common carriers and lose the ability to curate algorithmically

or

* Claim the free speech protections of the First Amendment but be liable for all content as it is their own speech.

Algorithmic libel detectors don't exist. The second option isn't possible. The result will be the separation of search and recommendation engines from social media platforms. Since there's effectively one search company in each national protectionist bloc, the result will be the creation of several new monopolies that hold the power to decide what news is front-page, and what is buried or practically unavailable. In the English-speaking world that right would go to Alphabet.

The second option isn’t really meant for social media anyway. It’s meant for traditional publishers such as newspapers.

If this goes through I don’t think it will be such a big boost for Google search as you suggest. For one thing, it has no effect on OpenAI and other LLM providers. That’s a real problem for Google, as I see a long term trend away from traditional search and towards LLMs for getting questions answered, especially among young people. Also note that YouTube is social media and features a curation algorithm to deliver personalized content feeds.

As for social media, I think we’re better off without it! There’s countless stories in the news about all the damage it’s causing to society. I don’t think we’ll be able to roll all that back but I hope we’ll be able to make things better.

If the ruling was upheld, Google wouldn't gain any new liability for putting a TikTok-like frontend on video search results; the only reason they're not doing it now is that all existing platforms (including YouTube) funnel all the recommendation clicks back into themselves. If YouTube had to stop offering recommendations, Google could take over their user experience and spin them off into a hosting company that derived its revenue from AdSense and its traffic from "Google Shorts."

This ruling is not a ban on algorithms, it's a ban on the vertical integration between search or recommendation and hosting that today makes it possible for search engines other than Google to see traffic.

I actually don't think Google search will be protected in its current form. Google doesn't show you unadulterated search results anymore, they personalize (read: editorialize) the results based on the data they've collected on you, the user. This is why two different people entering the same query can see dramatically different results.

If Google wants to preserve their safe harbour protections they'll need to roll back to a neutral algorithm that delivers the same results to everyone given an identical query. This won't be the end of the world for Google but it will produce lower quality results (at least in the eyes of normal users who aren't annoyed by the personalization). Lower quality results will further open the doors to LLMs as a competitor to search.

Newspapers editorialize and also give the same results to everybody.

And newspapers decide every single word they publish, because they’re liable for it. If a newspaper defames someone they can be sued.

This whole case comes down to having your cake and eating it too. Newspapers don’t have that. They have free speech protections but they aren’t absolved of liability for what they publish. They aren’t protected under section 230.

If the ruling is upheld by SCOTUS, Google will have to choose: section 230 (and no editorial control) or first amendment plus liability for everything they publish on SERPs.

> Algorithmic libel detectors don't exist

Automatic libel generators, on the other hand, are mych closer at hand. :p

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4546063

Solution that require everyone to do a thing, and do it well, are doomed to fail.

Yes, it would be great if parents would, universally, parent better, but getting all of them (or a large enough portion of them for it to make a difference) to do so is essentially impossible.

Government controls aren't a solution either though. The people with critical thinking skills, who can effectively tell others what to think, simply capture the government. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

I agree with this. Kids are already subject to an agenda; for example, never once in my K-12 education did I learn anything about sex. This was because it was politically controversial at the time (and maybe it still is now), so my school district just avoided the issue entirely.

I remember my mom being so mad about the curriculum in general that she ran for the school board and won. (I believe it was more of a math and science type thing. She was upset with how many coloring assignments I had. Frankly, I completely agreed with her then and I do now.)

I was lucky enough to go to a charter school where my teachers encouraged me to read books like "People's History of the U.S" and "Lies My Teacher Told Me". They have an agenda too, but understanding that there's a whole world of disagreement out there and that I should seek out multiple information sources and triangulate between them has been a huge superpower since. It's pretty shocking to understand the history of public education and realize that it wasn't created to benefit the student, but to benefit the future employers of those students.

> Yes, the solution is more speech.

I think we've reached the point now that there is more speech than any person can consume by a factor of a million. It now comes to down to picking what speech you want to hear. This is exactly what content algorithms are doing -> out of the millions of hours of speech produced in a day, it's giving you your 24 hours of it.

Saying "teach your kids critical thinking" is a solution but it's not the solution. At some point, you have to discover content out of those millions or hours a day. It's impossible to do yourself -- it's always going to be curated.

EDIT: To whomever downvoted this comment, you made my point. You should have replied instead.

K so several of the most well-funded tech companies on the planet sink literally billions of dollars into psyops research to reinforce addictive behavior and average parents are expected to successfully compete against it with...a lecture.

We have seen that adults can't seem to unhook from these dopamine delivery systems and you're expecting that children can do so?

Sorry. That's simply disingenuous.

Yes, children and especially teenagers do lots of things even though their parents try to prevent them from doing so. Even if children and teenagers still get them, we don't throw up our hands and sell them tobacco and alcohol anyway.