Rethinking Common Carriers

John Ohno
2 min readMar 27, 2021

Hot take: algorithmic sorting of timelines, displaying ads, and accepting subscription fees are all ‘editorial’ and therefore any for-profit organization should not be classified as a common carrier under section 230.

Show ads? Then you are making an editorial decision about which ads to accept — not common carrier.

Ask for subscriptions? Then you are making an editorial decision to exclude people who can’t afford your subscription fees — not common carrier.

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John Ohno

Resident hypertext crank. Author of Big and Small Computing: Trajectories for the Future of Software. http://www.lord-enki.net