"Earn It" proposed law would require pro-activity by platforms to protect children to keep Section 230 protections

In a recent video, Richard Hoeg (“Hoeg Law” or “Virtual Legality”) read and analyzed the entire text of the “Earn It” bill written in part by Senator Lindsey Graham, which implies that to maintain the downstream liability protections of Section 230, platforms would have to “earn it” by following “best practices” of a commission whose prescriptions would be unknown in advance logically.

The bill is essentially like a recursive function in mathematics.

  

One of the main points of the bill is to require platforms to attempt to prevent child exploitation or endangerment (including the pornography) on their platforms.   This reminds me of the expectations of COPA back in 1998. 

  

At 35:00 in the video Hoeg discusses U.S.C. 2252 and 2252A and at 45:00 2258, as particularly relevant to downstream liability exposure in the environment that could be created by this proposed law.

COPA decision back in 2007 had expressed a view that many people think websites should sell and act rather than just talk

I wanted to take a moment to revisit the COPA Court Decision from Philadelphia in March 2007, in the March 22 post.  I had visited the trial for one day as a sub-plaintiff on Oct. 30, 2006. 

    

On pages 51-52 of the Opinion (linked in the earlier post), Reed discusses the idea that websites, as a matter of course, should be expected to be able to process credit cards as a manner of age verification (which was at one time a proposed requirement of COPA – don’t confuse it with COPPA). 

   

That does presume a mentality that I discussed on a Wordpress blog Sunday, that in the future sites might be expected to have a legitimate commercial (or non-profit) purpose to be hosted.  It seems as this concept had been thought about back in the middle 2000’s even if not discussed much.