 I'm marking June 30th as, you know, basically the RIP internet date that I'm going to have a little headstone card for. You just heard from Dr. Eric Goldman from the Santa Clara University School of Law and that's what he said in an interview with Philip DeFranco. This man is an expert on Section 230 and we all just heard his grim prognosis if the Supreme Court does indeed choose to alter or repeal Section 230. The internet, as we know it, would cease to exist. It would still exist, but it would be an entirely different place and he's not the only one who's sounding the alarm. For example, Vox Raider Ian Milheiser says that the Supreme Court could ruin the internet with the two cases that it's set to hear this week, Gonzalez v. Google and Twitter v. Tamna. Now on top of those two cases, the Supreme Court is expected to take up two additional cases that are coming out of Florida and Texas and those cases could also yield similar outcomes. So we're looking at four different Supreme Court cases potentially that all could be disastrous for the internet and the odds of the internet winning here, according to Goldman, is very low. This is like a package of bad ideas. There's not just one bad idea. There's a lot going on there. In other words, for the internet to look like it does today, we have to win all four of those cases perfectly and those are really long odds that make me very, very nervous. Bleak, very bleak. Now I'll link you to his full interview with Philip DeFranco. I would highly recommend that you watch it. It was fascinating, albeit terrifying, but in order to understand why these cases are so monumental, you have to understand what's at stake with Section 230 and why it's important. Now back in October of last year, when we heard that the Supreme Court would be taking up these cases, I initially sounded the alarm and this was my explanation about Section 230 and arguments for and against it. Nobody really knows what the true takeaway would be in the event the Supreme Court struck down Section 230. We've heard a lot about this. We've heard critiques about Section 230 from the left and the right and the implications of its demise aren't really known. But one thing that is for sure is that it would radically change the internet and odds are it would be changed for the worse as opposed to the better. So what exactly is the Supreme Court looking at? Well, Mike Bebirnez of Yahoo News explains, the Supreme Court this week announced it will take up a pair of cases that could fundamentally change the legal foundations of the internet. Both cases ask justices to consider how far protections that shield websites and social media companies from legal liability over what users post to their platform should go. Those protections were created in a portion of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 known as Section 230, a provision that has been called the 26 words that created the internet. Section 230 did two crucial things. It established that companies operating websites or social media platforms could not be held legally responsible if their users post content that breaks the law. It also granted them the right to curate, edit and delete user content as they see fit. So suffice to say the internet in its current state exists specifically because of Section 230. Without Section 230, the internet might look like a very different place. Now, as I alluded to earlier, both Democrats and Republicans have critiqued Section 230 even though Donald Trump has been particularly vocal in his criticism. But the Democrats who oppose Section 230 claim that websites should be held more culpable if violent extremism is festering on their website, if the proliferation of misinformation on their website continues. Whereas Republicans don't like the second provision of Section 230, specifically the one that gives social media websites the power to delete and curate content, they don't like that because they claim that these websites all have a liberal bias and it leads to the censorship of conservatives. Now, that critique from Republicans is not really founded by data. You know, leftists also get banned from social media websites frequently as well. They just don't whine about it as much. But conservatives in particular, they get a ton of traction on websites like Facebook where the left just isn't able to compete. And they also dominate YouTube as well, although I don't have data to back that up. But just for arguments sake, you can see that there are different arguments against Section 230. Democrats are against one portion of Section 230 and conservatives are against another portion of Section 230. There's two sections of 230. And you know, there's reasons for both sides to be against it, at least what we've heard. Now, both of the cases that the Supreme Court has taken up, they have to do with families who are suing these tech giants, Twitter and Google in particular, because a member of these families fell victim to extremists. Now, the families are arguing in these lawsuits that websites should be held legally liable if extremism proliferates on their platforms and they don't take action to stop it. You could read more about this on the SCOTUS blog post about this. Now, the Supreme Court could go either way. They could side with the families and claim, yes, these websites, these tech giants in particular should have done more to prevent extremism that led to the deaths of these families victims. And they can also take it in a different direction. They can say, well, actually, there's already too much content moderation, or they could just strike down Section 230 altogether. The question is, what does that mean for the Internet going forward? And really, nobody really knows. All we can do is speculate. But odds are, it would mean less freedom on the Internet if the Supreme Court in any way decided to take on Section 230 and declare it unconstitutional, either fully or partially. Many communications law experts fear that a decision throwing out Section 230 would create chaos in one of the world's most important industries as companies attempt to quickly react to a sudden and drastic change to the legal landscape. They argue that because few companies would be able to endure the new financial risk of lawsuits over user-generated posts, venues for free speech online would rapidly erode or even disappear. Other sites might go the opposite direction and eschew moderation altogether, which would create space for their platforms to turn into cesspools of objectionable content. Kyle Barr of Gizmodo states, if a company like Twitter suddenly finds that it is held liable for each post on its site, the company says that its options would become limited to either folding entirely or conducting extreme amounts of vetting and content moderation, much more than already goes on. This, of course, isn't exactly what conservatives want, or it's at least what they claim that they don't want. So, envision that being the product, the end result of the Supreme Court ruling with regard to Section 230. What does this mean for independent media? YouTube shows like my own. Could independent media exist in a post Section 230 America? I genuinely don't know. Or if it does exist, would it exist in a different fashion? Would this force YouTube to hire content creators, for example, so that way they're not just independent contractors, so that way they have more direct control over what we as YouTubers say? Would Twitter take up a lot more bans? It's so hard to say, and it's horrifying to think about the implications of what this would look like. But as the article alluded to, it could go in the opposite direction as well, which wouldn't necessarily be ideal. For example, David Ingrim of NBC News explains, alternatively, the court could also create a situation in which tech companies have little power to moderate what users post, rolling back years of efforts to limit the reach of misinformation, abuse, and hate speech. So what would that look like in reality? Well, in the event a user, for example, makes a death threat online to a politician, that would disempower websites like Twitter or YouTube from suspending that user. They would have to allow the extremism to go on to that website. They would be unable to do anything about that. It would be in the hands of the local police department where that individual made that complaint. Does that sound like a really good alternative as well? To give them no tools whatsoever to get rid of violence and extremism. So YouTube would not be able to remove an ISIS beheading video. I mean, do you understand how both extremes when it comes to section 230, they don't provide a better alternative to the internet today? So the problem is that there's a lot of uncertainty. We don't know what the internet would look like without section 230. The internet as it exists today in its form currently is the result of section 230. Now we can only speculate about what the internet would look like, but Dr. Goldman in his interview with Philip DeFranco kind of gave us some scenarios and all of these scenarios are genuinely disturbing. It would radically transform social media, including YouTube. And what he said was genuinely chilling. One possible conclusion is that the court will say if the services take efforts to promote user content, they lose section 230. They can still host it. They can still gather it. But if they do anything to promote it, they will no longer have this legal shield. And in a situation like that, then the internet starts to look a lot more like Google Drive or Dropbox where people upload content, there's a hosting function, the services give them a URL, and then we all have to do our own work in order to get an audience for our content. That would just change the internet at its very core, how we think about the internet. And actually to illustrate exactly how bad this could be, Goldman gave us a helpful example of what the world would look like on our own platform here. So one likely scenario is that YouTube would scale back any recommendations at all. It would simply reduce the ability of users to find the content that they think is relevant, make it harder for them to do so. That's not really a good business experience for the users of YouTube. One other possibility is that YouTube could say instead of reducing recommendations, they'll keep doing recommendations like they have in the past. They'll just constrain the number of people who are allowed to publish on YouTube in the first place. But the people who would be allowed to publish are only those who YouTube decides are not legally risky, right? And obviously only a small percentage of creators would get that privilege and everyone else would kind of just get kicked off the service. From that perspective, one likely scenario of any change to Section 23 here is that we're going to see, quote, the rich get richer. The people who already have audiences and already have power in the marketplace of ideas, they're going to continue to get the same kind of treatment that they've got in the past. It's everyone else, the small players, the people who could become big influencers in the future, but haven't gone that far yet, they may never get that chance because the doors will be closed to them. But also with all this, let's be clear. This isn't just something that's going to apply to Google and YouTube. This would impact all social media companies that host third-party content and are currently protected by Section 230. So needless to say, the stakes are sky-high and the fate of the internet is in the hands of a group of far-right, tech-illiterate geriatrics who may not even know the weight of their decision here. I mean, think about that situation as much as we all gripe about algorithms and there is cause for frustration with them without algorithms to see YouTube turn into Dropbox to where our content cannot be distributed to anyone unless, of course, you're a large multinational corporation. I mean, all of us, like that, lose our voices on the internet. This is more monumental than net neutrality being repealed in my opinion. But the difference is that we're powerless here because we have no influence whatsoever over the Supreme Court. We're just sitting here crossing our fingers and hope that they don't make a catastrophic decision that equally affects everyone. On the left, on the right, this should be a nonpartisan issue. But as I explained initially back in October, both sides take issue with Section 230, but they haven't presented alternatives that would make the situation any better. I think that there is important ways that we can rein in big tech with antitrust laws by forcing these social media giants to be transparent with their algorithms. But to do anything with regard to Section 230, repeal it, chip away at it, that is something that I don't want to test out. I don't want to see what the internet will look like because I understand that means independent media is gone. Activists and journalists who get their work out will be no longer able to practice independently. They'd have to be part of some corporation like NBC or the New York Times. Anti-establishment voices could be snuffed out as a result of this case. And I don't think anybody really understands the gravity of this situation. So we don't know the outcome. We'll get a sense as to what way the Supreme Court is going to rule, hopefully in the next week when they hear this case. But either way, brace for impact because if they do anything to Section 230 and don't leave it intact as it is, it could be absolutely disastrous with a ripple effect that is going to span across the entire internet. And it's just horrifying to think about. So you've been warned.