Like Jimmy, I remember the web before section 230. At http://Tripod.com , we were providing homepage hosting services to thousands of users. Like Geocities, our main competitor, our product was free to use, supported by advertising. https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/1339928608618536960

We needed millions of users to make the economics of the product work, and we needed our support costs to be fairly low. Reviewing every piece of content before it was posted would not have been possible - we simply would not have offered our homepage building tool.

People figured out clever ways to use the server space we provided to share pirated software. As is typical in these cases, the users were often one step ahead of us - they'd learn how to mislabel a .rar file as a .jpg and evade our automated tools.

But we did the right thing: when publishers identified someone who was sharing software, we would review, offer the user a chance to take the files down, then delete the accounts. When a new technique arose, we'd alter our tools to identify these files...

and automatically queue the accounts for removal. We were responsive enough at doing this that a VP at Sony sent us a Playstation and some games to thank us for responding to a takedown request of game ROMs.

And then we got sued by the Software Publishers Association.

They demanded millions of dollars in compensation for lost revenue due to our "willful" distribution of copyrighted Adobe software. SPA and Adobe hadn't notified us of the software on our servers. They just went ahead and sued for amounts that would have put us out of business.

We got lucky - the SPA specified accounts that we'd taken down in our routine anti-piracy sweeps months earlier. We were able to get the suit dismissed on the simple basis that SPA simply had its facts wrong.

But had the SPA done a better job, they would have found pirated software on our servers and sued us into nonexistence.

Then section 230 happened. It's didn't let us off the hook - instead, it established a process for what we needed to do when alerted to a copyright complaint.

We continued to be more proactive than 230 demanded - frankly, hosting pirated software didn't help us, as the homepages that accompanied these caches of content were very low quality and advertisers didn't want to appear on them.

But we were free of "gotcha" suits like SPA's that would have put us out of business before we figured out how to manage users abusing our services.

There's lots wrong with the business model Tripod used and which Facebook uses - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advertising-is-the-internets-original-sin/376041/ - and we should work on finding better business models. And there's lots platforms can and should do to prevent the spread of mis- and disinformation.

But eliminating section 230 is a terrible way to solve these problems. Internet users are infinitely creative, and continue to find previously unimaginable ways to break rules. Removing section 230 won't eliminate disinformation just as it won't eliminate software piracy.

Nor will it necessarily unseat Facebook or other social media behemoths - they've got massive tech teams that can deploy AIs and other systems to police their content.

What it will do is destroy much smaller and less-well resourced products.

It would likely kill Wikipedia. It would almost surely kill off a new generation of social networks that are exploring distributed models to hosting content.

It would lock us into the world we've got now, where a couple of well-resourced networks have enormous influence over what speech is possible.

I remember the internet before 230. Let's not go back there.