This is a very general law. Saying something is 'injurious to public health, safety, morals, or welfare' is such a broad category.
Let's remember what we started with. It's a website where people chat and share images. Some people found information that caused or exaserbated consitions. If that is injurious to public health, then just about anything is.
I think this is very dangeous and it leads to any business or organization being potentially liable.
Doesn't every bar cause piblic nuisances? How about libraries? I can find all sorts of dangerous information at a library.
I think the real piblic hate is because people lost their minds when Trump won. People blamed Facebook for allowing that to happen (ie allowing free speech).
The worst curse put upon us is XNA games engine, which was unable to distinguish primary from secondary clicks. So players who swapped mouse buttons at the OS level were out of luck.
Most developers assumed that left click = primary click, but that's only true about 95% of the time.
There is a comment somewhere on HN where a person described implementing ads for a small, hobby website.
Users complaied about the price to go ad-free (something like $25 per year).
The commenter revealed that the actual revenue from ads was much more than $25 per year. Every person who purchased the ad-free option actually cost them money.
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The lesson I took away is that ads pay more than we expect, though i didn't know the specifics of YouTube.
By providing an ad-free option, they are really allowing the user to out-bid the advertiser.
I think for most people, they would not be willing to pay more to avoid the ad than the ad seller is willing to pay to show it. It's a weird conundrum--but people are very cheap.
I think that's the angle I'm going for. If Youtube was $25 per year or even $50 per year, it would be a no-brainer for me to pay that. Even if 50 does NOT outbid the advertiser, wouldn't YT rather have guaranteed income rather than trying to constantly find high bidders.
Youtube claims "we’ve reached 125 million YouTube Music and Premium subscribers globally, including trials"
And I bet most of that is trials and it's probably cumulative rather than right now. I bet that 500m people paying $50 /year would actually make them real money that is dependable - since most people would pay for it again next year to avoid ads. And the lower price would skyrocket subscriptions.
Malware is just software too, but we still have the CFAA.
Sure it doesn't prevent malware, far from it. But, it does relegate to basically only bad actors that we want in jail. Who are, usually, smaller and less organized.
Walmart, Amazon, the US government... these are big, big, big and very organized. If they use facial recognition tech, it's 1000x worse than some criminal. But if that's made illegal, they won't. Probably.
I used to use all sorts of small websites in 2005. But by 2015 I used only about 10 large ones.
Like many changes, I cannot pinpoint exactly when this happened. It just occurred to me someday that I do not run into many unusual websites any longer.
It's unfortunate that so much of our behavior is dictated by Google. I dint think it's malicious or even intentional--but at some point they stopped directing traffic to small websites.
And like a highway closeure ripples through small town economies, it was barely noticed by travellers but devestating to recipients. What were once quaint sites became abandoned.
The second force seems to be video. Because video is difficult and expensive to host, we moved away from websites. Travel blogs were replaced with travel vlogs. Tutorials became videos.
The experience of the internet would be so much more interesting if the search engines unearthed rare blogs or writing from small creators and bloggers that thought things through or shared original ideas.
It did seem we had that for a while and now everything funnels back to a handful of big platforms.
Maybe as AI swallows the data of the entire web, it would start to look for these small sites, small creators, and rare personal content to keep itself interesting and we'll see more of them?
Google gets money for showing ads and sponsored content on the search page. If you click on a site with Google ads or Google scripts, it gets more money and monetarizable PII. So its in their interest to prioritize sites with Google ads or Google services, but only Google staffers know exactly how the search algorithm works.
A few years ago they upranked all results on a few trusted domains, so many of those domains filled up with advertising and cheap copywritten content. They framed this as 'fighting misinformation.'
>I dint think it's malicious or even intentional...
it's indirectly intentional in that Google isn't wringing it's hands trying to destroy tiny blogs but they (Google) have deliberately chosen to ignore anything that doesn't play the SEO game, whatever the driver of that game is.
I am not sure about the legal implications. But, I do see the concern.
Someone else mentioned the analogy of patients preferring physicians of a given sex.
I would not be surprised if they find a way around this by just having riders 'select which driver you want'. Effectively putting the onus on the customer to do the discrimination.
> Add to this fatuous criminal charge the sad reality that the process is often the punishment. Even after Mr. Left's innocence gets determined by a jury, there's the strong possibility that he'll depart the courtroom to go home to the Poor House.
> See: Wall Street Journal 8 November 2015
> I Was an Oil Spill Scapegoat -- I helped cap the Deepwater Horizon well, The Justice Department then turned my life into a legal nightmare
> -- Kurt Mix, BP drilling engineer, who published a blistering commentary about the US Justice Department immediately following a major revision to the case. After two years of expensive, life-upending dealings, all of the felony charges got dropped, and, "I would plead guilty to a minor misdemeanor for deleting a set of text messages without BP’s permission—something I had acknowledged doing from the very beginning."
> Good luck Mr. Left...
I thought this was interesting on went down the BP prosecution rabbit hole.
There have been _3_ rabies transmissions in the IS in 50 years?
The writer suggests this likes it is rare. But organ donation is rare. And rabies is even rarer. That it has happened _three times_ seems surprising to me.
It makes sense to me. Donors are hard to come by -- you need someone healthy right up to the point that they died. People who die of rabies can apparently appear to have suffered a heart attack, which would make them prime candidates for organ donation.
Hmm, having read that, I am starting to sympathize with Google if they are going to be punished for being open.
No one seems to care that Apple has never allowed freedom on their devices. Even the comments here don't seem to mention it. Google was at least open for a while.
Or maybe no one mentions it just because the closed iPhone is a fait accompli at this point.
Perhaps because Apple never “promised” to be open, Google instead built itself by playing the good guy and started to switch when money called so those who chose them for that reason feel betrayed.
This is a very general law. Saying something is 'injurious to public health, safety, morals, or welfare' is such a broad category.
Let's remember what we started with. It's a website where people chat and share images. Some people found information that caused or exaserbated consitions. If that is injurious to public health, then just about anything is.
I think this is very dangeous and it leads to any business or organization being potentially liable.
Doesn't every bar cause piblic nuisances? How about libraries? I can find all sorts of dangerous information at a library.
I think the real piblic hate is because people lost their minds when Trump won. People blamed Facebook for allowing that to happen (ie allowing free speech).