The Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School is a leader in the study of the law and policy around the Internet and other emerging technologies.
Whether and when communications platforms like Google, Twitter and Facebook are liable for their users’ online activities is one of the key factors that affects innovation and free speech. Most creative expression today takes place over communications networks owned by private companies. Governments around the world increasingly press intermediaries to block their users’ undesirable online content in order to suppress dissent, hate speech, privacy violations and the like. One form of pressure is to make communications intermediaries legally responsible for what their users do and say. Liability regimes that put platform companies at legal risk for users’ online activity are a form of censorship-by-proxy, and thereby imperil both free expression and innovation, even as governments seek to resolve very real policy problems.
In the United States, the core doctrines of section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act have allowed these online intermediary platforms user generated content to flourish. But, immunities and safe harbors for intermediaries are under threat in the U.S. and globally as governments seek to deputize intermediaries to assist in law enforcement.
To contribute to this important policy debate, CIS studies international approaches to intermediary obligations concerning users’ copyright infringement, defamation, hate speech or other vicarious liabilities, immunities, or safe harbors; publishes a repository of information on international liability regimes and works with global platforms and free expression groups to advocate for policies that will protect innovation, freedom of expression, privacy and other user rights.
Daphne Keller studies the ways that Internet content platforms – and the laws governing them -- shape information access and other rights of ordinary Internet users.
Giancarlo F. Frosio is a Non-Residential Fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. Previously he was the Intermediary Liabilty fellow with Stanford CIS. Giancarlo is a qualified attorney with a doctoral degree (S.J.D.) in intellectual property law from Duke University Law School. Additionally, he holds an LL.M. with emphasis in intellectual property law from Duke Law School, an LL.M. in information technology and telecommunications law from Strathclyde University in Glasgow, and a law degree from Università Cattolica in Milan.
Luiz Fernando Marrey Moncau is a Non-Residential Fellow at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. He was previously the Intermediary Liability Fellow at Stanford CIS. He was also head of the Center for Technology and Society (CTS) at the law school of the Getulio Vargas Foundation in Rio de Janeiro (FGV DIREITO RIO), where he coordinated and conducted research on freedom of expression, intellectual property, Internet regulation, consumer rights and telecommunications regulation.
According to one recent poll, 84 percent of Americans believe that tech platforms should be held legally responsible for the content they carry.
When you give sites and services information about yourself, where does it go? Who else will get hold of it, and what will they use it for? The recent revelations about Cambridge Analytica's acquisition of data about tens of millions of Facebook users without their knowledge or consent have prompted renewed interest in how data about us gets shared, sold, used, and misused -- well beyond what we ever expected. Join us for a SLATA/CIS lunchtime conversation with three experts from Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society as we discuss the legal and policy implications of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and responses from Congress and courts. How can we prevent this from happening again? What new problems might we create through poorly-crafted legal responses?
Ads are the lifeblood of the web -- but the legal challenges have never been greater. On May 25, Europe's privacy regime is overhauled for the first time in 20 years, and publishers, advertisers and ad tech companies alike are confused about what it all means. Struan Robertson, a product counsel working in Google's ads business for the past seven years, gives his perspective on the legal challenges facing the industry.
Content moderation is such a complex and laborious undertaking that, all things considered, it's amazing that it works at all, and as well as it does. Moderation is resource intensive and relentless; it requires making difficult and often untenable distinctions; it is wholly unclear what the standards should be, especially on a global scale; and one failure can incur enough public outrage to overshadow a million quiet successes.
June 26, 2018
Cybersecurity is increasingly a major concern of modern life, coloring everything from the way we vote to the way we drive to the way our health care records are stored. Yet online security is beset by threats from nation-states and terrorists and organized crime, and our favorite social media sites are drowning in conspiracy theories and disinformation. How do we reset the internet and reestablish control over our own information and digital society?
April 24, 2018
"The European Union is getting ready to enact sweeping new digital privacy laws. Facebook says it’s going comply. Is what’s good for Europe good for the U.S.?
On the legal challenges of the right to be forgotten
March 20, 2018
"Daphne Keller, a specialist in corporate liability and responsibility at Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society, says Facebook could face private lawsuits over privacy."
November 14, 2017
We've been talking about internet platform regulation for a long time, but in the past year these issues have gotten a huge amount of increased focus — for a bunch of fairly obvious reasons.
