Comment by 1vuio0pswjnm7

"Because open protocols were abandoned, because they generally lacked security, discoverability, and perhaps most significantly of all, moderation."

Does centralization actually result in moderation

How do we define "moderation" (cf. "curation", e.g., filtering out anything that does not draw sufficiently large audiences for advertising)

Is optimizing information retrieval for data collection, surveillance and advertising "moderation"

Section 230 was supposed to promote moderation

It did not

Instead it allowed a select few websites to grow to sizes where moderation is impractical and, ultimately, bad for "business"

Their "business" is data collection, surveillance and advertising services, not information services. Section 230 did not anticipate this "business model"

They don't work for internet users. They work for advertisers

Having used the internet prior to their existence I am not convinced that the internet is useless without them

Anyone who has made a fortune catering to internet advertisers will of course disagree

That's fine but we have to account for bias

Given what has happened to "search" perhaps more internet users will come to understand that "discoverability" is not a "solved problem" when the "solution" is a middleman that works for advertisers not end users, an easy target for governments that wish to work around limits on their ability to legally conduct data collection and surveillance