att Drudge, a cyber-columnist, wrote an article about domestic violence between Sydney Blumenthal (an aide of President Clinton) and his wife. Although Drudge retracted the story and apologized, Blumenthal filled a libel suit against him and AOL. In spite of the fact that the article was posted on Drudge’s site within AOL’s network and the U.S. District Court judge dismissed AOL from the suit, because it was protected by Section 230 of the DCA. In Zeran v. America Online, the issue was whether AOL would be held liable for being slow to remove a series of allegedly defamatory messages posted on its bulletin board by an unidentified third party. An anonymous message posted on AOL’s message board wrongly stated that Kenneth Zeran was selling T-shirts with offensive slogans about the Oklahoma bombing. Because Zeran’ s phone number was listed on the message, he received death threats and insulting calls. He then sued AOL for taking too long to remove the initial message, as well as the ones that followed, and for failing to post a retraction. The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina cited Section 230, held in AOL’s favor, and eventually denied Zeran’ s appeal. In the court’s opinion the purpose of Section 2340 was precisely to protect freedom of speech on the Internet, since: “It would be impossible for service providers to screen each of their millions of postings for possible problems.” The Court of Appeals based its ruling on Section 230. Although these three cases are not linked to hate speech per se, they are relevant in showing to what extent it is hard to regulate the Internet, since service providers are never held liable for the content of the messages found on their servers. Nevertheless, ISPs have a choice in regulating the material located on their network, hence, most of them decide to obey the law and many ban libelous or defamatory spee...
