If they shred the legal immunity, the only platforms remaining will be the giants. It would be the ultimate moat for Facebook, Google, etc.
I've been waiting for two decades for the monsters in DC (and their many accomplices) to legislatively make it impossible to wake up in the morning with a normal business idea (not talking Napster here) and decide to just build it without having to go through an endless parade of legal/political/regulatory/licensing concerns. It doesn't appear to be far away now, the government monster is always hungry, always expansive, always looking to dig its claws into any bastions of free movement.
My suggestion to younger entrepreneurs out there: get it while you can. This glorious period of having so much freedom to create/build - no permission required - will probably seem like a distant fantasy in another decade. There is no scenario in which they aren't going to add more and more friction to the process, putting themselves in-between you and building things online as just another layer of control.
Why would this necessarily mean they're getting rid of all legal immunity? I think we have plenty of examples outside of the digital world where legal immunity is maintained.
The digital world currently has an excessively powerful version of this -- even when they're not neutral, they're still immune, which definitely needs to be fixed.
I've been waiting for two decades for the monsters in DC (and their many accomplices) to legislatively make it impossible to wake up in the morning with a normal business idea (not talking Napster here) and decide to just build it without having to go through an endless parade of legal/political/regulatory/licensing concerns. It doesn't appear to be far away now, the government monster is always hungry, always expansive, always looking to dig its claws into any bastions of free movement.
My suggestion to younger entrepreneurs out there: get it while you can. This glorious period of having so much freedom to create/build - no permission required - will probably seem like a distant fantasy in another decade. There is no scenario in which they aren't going to add more and more friction to the process, putting themselves in-between you and building things online as just another layer of control.