As expected, the EARN IT Act is set to be marked up this week, and today (a day before the markup) Senators Graham and Blumenthal announced a "manager's amendment" that basically rewrites the entire bill. It has some resemblance to the...
As expected, the EARN IT Act is set to be marked up this week, and today (a day before the markup) Senators Graham and Blumenthal announced a "manager's amendment" that basically rewrites the entire bill. It has some resemblance to the original bill, in that this bill will also create a giant "national commission on online child sexual exploitation prevention" to "develop recommended best practices" that various websites can use to "prevent, reduce, and respond to the online sexual exploitation of children," but then has removed the whole "earn it" part of the "EARN IT" Act in that there seems to be no legal consequences for any site not following these "best practices" (yet). In the original bill, not following the best practices would lose sites their Section 230 protections. Now... not following them is just... not following them. The Commission just gets to shout into the wind.
Of course, we've seen mission creep on things like this before, where "best practices" later get encoded into law, so there remain significant concerns about how this all plays out in the long run, even if they've removed some of the bite from this version.
Instead, the major "change" with this version of EARN IT, is that it basically replicates FOSTA in creating a specific "carve out" for child sexual abuse material (CSAM, or the artist formerly known as "child porn"). It's almost an exact replica of FOSTA, except instead of "sex trafficking and prostitution" they say the same thing about 230 not impacting laws regarding CSAM. This is... weird? And pointless? It's not like there is some long list of cases regarding CSAM where Section 230 got in the way. There are no sites anyone can point to as "hiding behind Section 230" in order to encourage such content. This is all... performative. And, if anything, we're already seeing people realize that FOSTA did nothing to stop sex trafficking, but did have massive unintended consequences. ..
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