The US Supreme Court has decided to hear a high-stakes case that might fundamentally change the internet.

TheGonzalez vs Google case emerged due to the killing of Nohemi Gonzalez, a 23-year-old American law student studying in Paris, in an ISIS attack that killed 129 people in November 2015.

Nohemi’s family sued Google alleging that ISIS posted “hundreds of radicalising videos inciting violence and recruiting potential supporters” on YouTube, owned by Google, and YouTube’s algorithms promoted these contents to “users whose characteristics indicated that they would be interested in ISIS videos.”

Well, we know that behind-the-scenes algorithms determine the content we see on social media, the websites we find on search engines, and also the ads.

This is not the first time that such allegations are being floated against YouTube though. In a 2018 article in The New York Times, sociologist Zeynep Tufekci warned that “YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalising instruments of the 21st century” because of its algorithms’ propensity to serve up more and more extreme versions of the content its users decide to watch.

Looking back

Let’s look at some historical background in the framing of today’s internet laws. In 1959, the US Supreme Court heard the case of Eleazer Smith, a Los Angeles book-store owner, who was convicted and given a 30-day jail term for selling the pulp novel Sweeter Than Life by Mark Tryon, which was illegal.

The Supreme Court, of course, held that the Los Angeles ordinance violated the First Amendment. It was the pre-internet era, for sure.

Then, in the Stratton Oakmont, Inc vs Prodigy Services Co case in 1995, the New York Supreme Court’s decision holding that online service providers could be held liable for the speech of their users altered many early supporters of the internet, including some lawmakers. The Prodigy case might have been instrumental in the framing of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in 1996.

Interestingly, Representative Chris Cox from California, a Republican, and Senator Ron Wyden from Oregon, a Democrat, jointly inserted a clause into the sprawling telecommunications Bill that was then on its way through Congress. It certainly helped internet companies to flourish in those early days of web-hosting services.

26 words

Cybersecurity law professor Jeff Kosseff wrote a book in 2019 titled The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet. The 26 words are: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider”. Thus, a law of the CD-ROM era remained the backbone of the mechanism of the modern internet.

Social media companies have so far been shielded from legal liability under Section 230, and thus Google cannot be sued for anybody’s posting on one of its websites. But the Gonzalez suit argues that while YouTube may have legal protection for hosting whatever its users post on it, it should not have protection for its machine-learning “recommendation” algorithms that prescribe what the viewers should view next. What if the bookseller recommends a book to a buyer?

Exactly 26 years have passed after the 26 words that ‘created’ the internet were framed. Internet giants are in no way in their formative stage now. And they are on the receiving end of various issues — from antitrust to privacy to misinformation to algorithmic discrimination and lack of transparency.

Is it time to have a paradigm shift in the way the internet runs? In the Gonzalez vs Google case, the US Supreme Court could possibly decide the fate of the modern internet in many ways.

The writer is Professor of Statistics, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata

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