MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEM

Read the excerpt below from a book review on the "safe harbor" claude in Section 230 of the CDA and answer the following:

a. Do you agree or disagree with the statement "the 26 words that created the internet"

b. Will e-business models griw on the net if the safe harbor provision is removed? (Agree/Disagree)

c. Should the probision be eliminated or changed? Provide your recommendation

"Jeff Kosseft's "The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet" is in many ways the story of how and why this happened. The 26 words are these: No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." They form Section 230 of the otherwise irrelevant Communications Decency Act, itself a part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Without them the internet would play a very different, and a much smaller, role in our lives. Section 230 shields online platforms from legal liability for content generated by third-party users. Put simply: If you're harassed by a Facebook user, or if your business is defamed by a Yelp reviewer, you might be able to sue the harasser or the reviewer, assuming you know his or her identity, but don't bother suing Facebook or Yelp. They're probably immune. That immunity is what enabled American tech firms to become far more than producers of content (the online versions of newspapers, say, or company websites) and to harness the energy and creativity of hundreds of millions of individual users. The most popular sites on the web, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, eBay, Reddit, Wikipedia, Amazon-depend in part or in whole on user-generated content." "American law's "internet exceptionalism," as it's known, is the source of mind-blowing technological innovation, unprecedented economic opportunity and, as Mr. Kosseff shows in detail, a great deal of human pain. The book chronicles the plights of several people who found themselves targeted or terrorized by mostly anonymous users. Many of these people, for reasons one can guess, were women. Each of them sued the internet service providers or websites that facilitated these acts of malice and failed to do anything about them when alerted. And each lostthanks to the immunity afforded to providers by Section 230. Has the time come to delete the section? Last year Congress passed an exception to the law's immunity for sex trafficking; and a few political leaders, among them Sen. Josh Hawley and presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke, support limiting Section 230 in various ways. Mr. Kosseff acknowledges the dreadful problems caused by internet exceptionalism, but he still sides, reluctantly, with Section 230. I remain convinced that the massive industry, social change, and free speech that we have seen since 1996 would not have been possible without Section 230." Clearly there is truth in that, and in any case Section 230 isn't going anywhere for the simple reason that Congress isn't going to wreck the tech industry. But I'm not sure user- driven web platforms have brought about even the happy results Mr. Kosseff alludes to. Massive" social change? Yes, if by that we mean the destruction of local newspapers, the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories and crank politics, and the cultivation of an entire class of educated people who think Twitter is reality. Massive" free speech? They've given us more speech, for sure, but they've also enabled stupid and vicious verbiage to drown out reasonable speech and encouraged a younger generation to wonder what the point of free speech was in the first place