Op-Ed: The Supreme Court could upend the internet. How? With its ruling on digital privacy.
Update: This article has been updated to include statements from EFF and ACLU.
If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve been considering making big changes about how you manage your online data. These changes are the result of the Supreme Court’s ruling today in the case brought by the Center for Democracy & Technology, or CDT, on behalf of Google, Amazon, and Facebook.
The ruling has immediate implications for how we manage our online data. In the decades since the court’s landmark 2004 ruling in the Citizens United case, people have been experimenting with the idea that money buys a greater say in how information is presented to consumers.
In that case, the Supreme Court ruled that money can be speech, and that corporations cannot, as a matter of “first amendment speech,” make it hard to see who’s spending money on political ads, where the ad is being shown, or any other information that would reveal who was funding the communications.
But now the court has found that the internet is an information commons that requires a new, and more expansive, set of restrictions on who can use it and who can’t use it. The court said yesterday that one of the questions we should be asking ourselves—and one that the court was very careful to leave open for future consideration—is if online speech should be limited at all.
The court said that Congress has not “tapped into the commercial potential of the Internet to promote civic discourse” or “enhance speech” by limiting what you can share, read, or access online. And if you’re the type of person who thinks the internet should be limited by Congress in order to support public speech, you’re not alone.
One of the two dissenting opinions—from Justice Samuel Alito—said that the internet as a whole is already limited, because it is regulated by the Federal Communications Commission (the FCC). But the court majority, led by Justice Anthony Kennedy, found that regulating social media sites that host political speech was no different than regulating cable television stations, which
