Section 230 & Online Rights: Here’s How Biden & Harris Stand

LOS ANGELES—As AVN reported on Thursday, the law known as “the First Amendment of the Internet” — Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act — is now weathering attacks from both ends of the political spectrum in Washington, and the future of open online communication for the adult industry and across the board appears in doubt. Donald Trump has already signed an executive order instructing the Federal Communications Commission to review and possibly revise Section 230, though there is considerable question whether the FCC is Constitutionally permitted to do so.  Attorney General William Barr has also proposed a series of rollbacks to Section 230 protections. The 24-year-old law allows open communication online by freeing platforms from responsibility for content posted by users. But with the Democratic presidential ticket now finalized, it has become clear that even a change in the White House may not shield Section 230 from further attacks. Both presidential presumptive nominee Joe Biden and vice-presidential pick Kamala Harris have supported weakening Section 230 protections — with Biden even flatly calling for the law’s full repeal.  According to a new study by the Washington D.C. think tank The Brookings Institute, “a Biden-Harris administration is likely to move towards greater regulation of the technology sector. That includes stronger action on competition policy, antitrust enforcement, privacy policy, cybersecurity, and Section 230 reforms.” Harris already has a record of chipping away at Section 230 protections, when she voted in favor of the 2018 FOSTA/SESTA bill, a law supposedly intended to curb sex trafficking on the internet. Because the law took away Section 230 safeguards for sites with posts that promote alleged “sex trafficking,” sex workers say that the law has driven them offline, back onto the streets, and made their occupations more dangerous. All but two U.S. Senators voted in favor of the FOSTA/SESTA bill, and Harris has not renounced her support for it. But during the Democratic primary campaign, she reversed her previous stance on decriminalizing sex work, saying that she now supports decriminalization as long as the work is consensual between sex worker and customer. While Harris’s stance on Section 230 has not been made clear beyond her support for Section 230, she has been a supporter of net neutrality rules, and “is likely to push for those provisions as a matter of social justice,” according to the Brookings Institute report. Biden’s stance on net neutrality — regulations requiring telecom companies to treat all data traffic equally — has been less clear. During the primary campaign, he never stated either support or opposition, though as vice president he was part of the Barack Obama administration that enacted net neutrality rules in 2015. Those rules were repealed in 2018 by the current, Republican-led FCC.  But after becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee, Biden said that he did, in fact, support net neutrality regulations. In a statement issued in July, Biden said he would “restore the FCC’s clear authority to take strong enforcement action against broadband providers who violate net neutrality principles through blocking, throttling, paid prioritization, or other measures that create artificial scarcity and raise consumer prices for this vital service.” Photos By Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia Commons