22 February—Yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Gonzalez v. Google (Reynaldo Gonzalez, et al., v. Google LLC), the case brought against the company that owns YouTube by the family of 23-year-old college student Nohemi Gonzalez, who was the only U.S. citizen killed in a 2015 ISIS attack on Paris restaurants. The Gonzalez family claims that YouTube’s algorithms that recommended pro-ISIS videos were at least in part responsible for Nohemi’s murder by the terrorists. She was among over 130 victims of those unspeakable bastards.

The case got to the Supremes from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which, sustaining the trial court’s decision against the Gonzalez family, had ruled that Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, part of the Communications Decency Act, protects technical platforms of internet service providers like Google—and by extension social media and review websites, inter alia—from liability because they’re presumably and essentially acting as Good Samaritans by simply providing people with the means to broadcast whatever they damn well please, while not committing or interposing themselves one way or another.

That’s great. Except it’s not quite the whole story. The whores in the Capitol—any capitol—can never do the right thing without somehow screwing it up. That’s where Communications Decency comes in.

You’d think that internet soapbox providers (ISPs), exempted of any accountability and liability for content, would simply transmit and broadcast anything and everything. That’s certainly as it should be. But no, Section 230 allows—and even encourages—the ISPs to remove or moderate in “good faith” any material they deem “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.” Wow! How much were the whores paid off to include that?

And that’s the part that really stinks. It’s the basis of Gonzalez, but not the smelly part. Rather, the fact that the ISPs have been granted what amounts to absolute immunity for content but still retain the right to censor that content stinks to high heaven and back.

The ISPs have it both ways. Congress gave it to them both ways and the ISPs run with their virtual freedom and abuse it for their own convenience (i.e., profit) and self-serving ends (i.e., profit). It’s not that the ISPs’ ends are often politically motivated that’s disturbing. Not at all. It’s that, given content carte blanche, the ISPs shouldn’t be allowed to judge and censor the content they transmit—and get away with it with undeserved, unreserved impunity.

If the ISPs are simply conduits of information and opinion, they must be required to receive and transmit all data without limit, qualification, alteration, or even comment. If, on the other hand, the ISPs are really functioning as publishers and broadcasters, then they must be exposed to the same legal restrictions, liabilities, and consequences as all other publishers and broadcasters. Fair is fair.

I’d think that Section 230 and the whole damn Communications Decency Act needed more properly to be refined by Congress rather than interpreted by the Supreme Court. But Congress has screwed up communications legislation (as it tends to do with everything), forever, so now it’s up to the Supremes, who, as we all know, never screw anything up. So I shouldn’t be at all surprised if they decide to toss the piping hot potato back to Congress . . .