Forget About Social Media Content Moderation; Get Ready For Internet Infrastructure Content Moderation

The big topic du jour, of course, has been about content moderation on social media. But that may only be just the very beginning of where all of this heads. It didn't get that much attention, but last week Microsoft threatened to take down all of Gab.ai based on some (really awful) posts on that site. Gab, if you don't know, is the social network "alternative" that claims to be free speech supporting (even if that's a bit of an exaggeration), when it really has basically become the home to all the assholes who have been kicked off of Twitter. It's generally a cesspool of idiocy, so it's not clear what suddenly inspired Microsoft -- which hosts Gab on its Azure cloud platform -- to suddenly speak up.

As we've noted many times in the past, Microsoft, like any company, has certain rights, including First Amendment rights for what speech lives on its own computers and who it associates with. But, we're talking about a different kind of ballgame when we start getting to the infrastructure level, rather than just talking about content moderation at the edge provider level. This hearkens back to the big post I did nearly a year ago when Cloudflare stopped providing service to the Daily Stormer. As I noted at the time, there were no easy answers, and the situation is incredibly complicated. Simply kicking bad services off the internet doesn't make their hatred/ignorance/stupidity go away (and sometimes allows it to fester in even darker corners, where it can't be monitored or countered).

But there's an even larger issue here when its these infrastructure players making determinations on content at various edge providers -- effectively having their own terms of service substitute for the edge providers'. We discussed some of this on a recent podcast, focusing on how the legacy copyright players have been targeting infrastructure players -- CDNs, payment processors, advertising networks, domain registrars and registers, and even ICANN itself. While, again, these providers, as private companies, have every right to make their own decisions, they have much greater power than edge providers, and the tools they have are much blunter. Whereas Twitter can just take down a single Tweet, Microsoft's only remedy for bad content on Gab is to take down all of Gab.

This is a big issue that deserves a lot more thoughtful discussion, so it's great that Glenn Fleishman over at Fortune has started to question how infrastructure providers are dealing with these questions (for the most part, they're trying to avoid answering these questions). I'm briefly quoted in the article, from a much longer conversation that Glenn and I had where we tried to work through a variety of different ideas.

And, as I wrote in last year's post about the Cloudflare situation, I'm a lot more worried about infrastructure players suddenly deciding that they should have an editorial say as well, as that seems well beyond what role they should be playing. Yes, again, they have every right to stop working with services they dislike, but we should be discussing the potential impact of infrastructure players as censors. With edge services, one point that is regularly brought up is that if you don't like how a service is running you can just go to another one or build your own. But that gets a lot more complicated when you get to the infrastructure level where you can't just "build your own" and the number of options may be greatly limited.

As Glenn notes in his piece:

And infrastructure hosts have a great basis on which to claim neutrality on most points of view. For one part, that's because because they don't slap their name and branding-or sell advertising-alongside the content, unlike the Twitters and YouTubes of the web. But the other is that these Internet plumbing companies have to manage the complexity of operating their back-ends in nearly every country in the world, navigating often-conflicting cultural expectations and laws. In that climate, remaining as impartial as possible about content can help avoid nation-state demands on disconnecting groups and people.

But bans by consumer-facing providers have sparked new era of scrutiny, increased demands on accountability and possibly even transparency about hosting and connectivity. And with them, ironically, begin info wars in earnest. Infrastructure companies may not be able to stay out of the fight forever.

Indeed, infrastructure providers are the next battleground, and we should start thinking about what that means earlier, rather than waiting until everything is a total mess.