Today’s NYT reports on the white paper Google commissioned from our host, Eugene (about which Eugene blogged here). I don’t know this area nearly as well as Eugene does, but I found this portion of the article particularly interesting:
there is a bit of a rub for Google, some scholars say. The kind of reasoning Mr. Volokh uses in his paper could come into conflict with one of Google’s policy priorities — the so-called net neutrality rules that call for everyone to get equal treatment on the Internet.
Since Google is not connecting users to the Internet, it is vital for its business that the companies that provide access to the Internet do not play favorites. Yet, if those providers could somehow qualify for First Amendment protection, then the government would have a harder time mandating “net neutrality.”
Mr. Volokh never mentions net neutrality in the paper, but a Duke law professor, Stuart M. Benjamin, who has written an academic paper casting doubt on First Amendment protection for mere transmitters of information like Internet service providers, said he saw a clear connection.
Mr. Benjamin said an Internet provider like Comcast, for example, could offer “a family friendly Web,” which would filter out content considered inappropriate for children; by doing so, “they have now gone to protected speech.”
But he also suggested there was a potential for Mr. Volokh’s reasoning to extend First Amendment protections to transmitters that do even less — for example, those that simply provide faster speeds to companies that pay more money. That is the kind of behavior net neutrality rules are meant to prevent.
The more the First Amendment is applied to how information is transmitted via the Internet, Mr. Benjamin said, the harder it is to regulate. “Whether that is a good or bad thing depends on your political perspective,” he said.