Reclaiming the Internet: How Big Tech Took Control and How We Can Take It Back
Decide its fate
Only the gun industry enjoys a liability shield like Section 230, and this 192-page brief shows what grew under it: infinite scroll, autoplay, feeds tuned to psychological vulnerability. One admirer says it "meticulously exposes how a handful of corporations hide ruthless systems of surveillance, addiction, and commercial exploitation behind legal and cultural myths around neutrality and free expression." And what hides back there: "algorithms, amplifying our deepest vulnerabilities, now serve their creators’ bottom line," a critic writes. None of it hypothetical: "design choices have led to harms ranging from sexual exploitation to suicide." Because it compresses the whole fight since the 1990s into 192 pages, "The less exposure someone has to this field, the more I would recommend Reclaiming the Internet to them," one reader writes.
Carve design liability out of Section 230 and platforms will not fix their features, they will delete them, because deletion never lands you in court. A host who runs forums and a Mastodon instance warns, "Absent that kind of protection, I can't afford to go to court. I would shut those down." His co-host follows that logic out: "We end up back in the place where there's a few media brands and they're theirs and they're not ours and we can't speak in them." "Sylvain could have spent more time detailing the rationales and pathways to solving the problems presented by Big Tech," one reader writes. The author, pressed on air, admits, "I have the benefit of never having run a company and maybe that's a bad thing."
