Comments on: Search engines are not common carriers

By: David Nieporent

David Nieporent — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 18:51:31 +0000

Tom, I’ll respond in the other thread regarding the ‘gay’ suit, but my main point was how trivial her suit was, not whether it had a legal foundation.

JB: Good question. The answer is no: Section 230 of the CDA provides explicit protection for companies that filter user-provided content, against exactly the sort of claims you posit. Indeed, that was the original motivation for enacting that section, although Congress wrote it even more broadly than that.

By: jb

jb — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 15:09:42 +0000

But won’t this leave it open to suits when it displays objectionable content? I.E, “They chose not to list this guy’s site, but they listed this site that has child porn…”

By: Tom T.

Tom T. — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 12:27:35 +0000

I can’t help but note that the First Amendment that Google cited in defense to this lawsuit is the same First Amendment cited by the student (in the next item above) in defense to a disciplinary action. In that item, you didn’t specifically mention the First Amendment but instead speculated whether the student was trying to rely on “constitutional rights (to call things gay?)” Obviously, the parameters of the law are different as applied to high school speech and to commercial speech, but it seemed worthwhile to point out that it’s the same law at issue.