It's Not a Subsidy to Big Tech

Most Section 230 reform efforts are based on the predicate claim that the immunity the statute provides is a "subsidy to Big Tech." The argument then follows that if government grants a subsidy to an industry, particularly a large one, there are no legal or constitutional problems with either conditioning that subsidy on certain conduct or revoking it altogether. This premise is wrong. It conflates a subsidy with an immunity, which is conceptually distinct. It misstates both the intended and actual primary beneficiaries of Section 230's immunity, who are not large social media platforms or search engines, but Internet users.

In so doing, the subsidy-to-Big-Tech myth intentionally mischaracterizes both what Section 230 actually does and who benefits from it.