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dot org slash give tech. A new take on big Tech's favorite law.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Lily Dramale. The Internet today is largely governed by 26 words in the Communications Decency Act, signed on February 8, 1996, by then President

Bill Clinton.

Today, with the stroke of a pen, our laws will catch up with our future.

The web has changed just a bit since then, but section 230 of that law has not.

Today, social media companies routinely use Section 230 to protect themselves from liability

over what users post.

Now, an internet scholar wants to change that status quo. Will Ais wrote about him for the Washington Post.

So Ethan Zuckerman is this figure who's been a thinker about the web and about social media for pretty much as long as they've been around.

He was an early employee of this company called Tripod.com from the original

dot com boom and then he eventually became a scholar and a thinker about social media and he is now a

professor at UMass Amherst where he teaches digital media and he was teaching a class on Section 230 which he thought he knew pretty well.

He had actually been sued, his company had been sued back in the 90s and when section 230 passed it

resolved that lawsuit it made clear that they weren't going to be able to be held liable

for that sort of thing so one day a couple years ago who's teaching his class and

reading the text of this statute out loud and he stumbled

across a part that just made a light bulb go off in his head.

...