How We Got Into This Mess!

A short Federal Statute designed in 1995 to clean up the information superhighway helped transform the web into a wildly lucrative industry. It also turned the internet into a hatefilled, toxic mess

- Felix Gillette

One afternoon in July, Ted Cruz banged a gavel on the dais, calling to order a hearing of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution. The day’s first witness was Karan Bhatia, a top policy adviser for Google. He gazed up at the panel of senators, alarm creeping into his expression, like a 10-point buck hearing the sudden crack of gunfire.

When elected officials start appending the prefix “big” to the name of an industry, it’s never a good omen. Big Tobacco. Big Oil. Big Pharma. Big Soda. “Sometimes tech companies talk about their products and the effects of those products as though they are forces outside of Big Tech’s control,” Cruz said. “As we’ve heard time and time again, Big Tech’s favorite defense is, ‘It wasn’t me. The algorithm did it.’ ”

For the next couple hours, the senators took turns walloping the most despised industry of the moment. They knocked its carelessness with consumer data, its violations of individual privacy, its tolerance of harassment and misinformation, its censorship of political dissent, and its hospitality toward extremists. “It seems like the problems around Big Tech, as it has become a mature industry, are just mushrooming,” said Senator Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican. Perhaps it was time, Cruz rejoined, for Congress to revisit Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act—a slim and powerful law, cherished in Silicon Valley, that shields internet companies from liability for most of the material their users post.