Footnote:
In: Berkeley Technology Law Journal
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments April 19, 2023 erstellt
Description:
Scholars have debated the costs and benefits of Internet intermediary liability for decades. Many of their arguments rest on informal economic arguments about the effects of different liability rules. Some scholars argue that broad immunity is necessary to prevent overmoderation; others argue that liability is necessary to prevent undermoderation. These are economic questions, but they rarely receive economic answers.In this paper, we seek to illuminate these debates by giving a formal economic model of intermediary liability. The key features of our model are externalities, imperfect information, and investigation costs. A platform hosts user-submitted content, but it does not know which of that content is harmful to society and which is beneficial. Instead, the platform observes only the probability that each item is harmful. Based on that knowledge, it can choose to take the content down, leave the content up, or incur a cost to determine with certainty whether it is harmful. The platform’s choice reflects the tradeoffs inherent in content moderation: between false positives and false negatives, and between scalable but more error-prone processes and more intensive but costly human review.We analyze various plausible legal regimes, including strict liability, negligence, blanket immunity, conditional immunity, liability on notice, subsidies, and must-carry, and we use the results of this analysis to describe current and proposed laws in the United States and European Union