The legislators who created §230 thought these incentives were bad, and wanted service operators to be able to choose to place themselves somewhere other than these two endpoints.
Did providers really have the ability to claim to be "platforms" before? If so, then I guess I am super anti- section 230 (which I have always been somewhat uncomfortable with, despite the EFF insisting that I should like it... but their arguments frankly always felt like "without this we don't have platforms", and I agree we should have platforms and would not want a world without platforms; in some sense I feel like the correct solution is force everyone to be a publisher and then you get people building distributed systems to have platforms, so no one can be said to own or control them).
> despite the EFF insisting that I should like it...
I should mention that I work there and I like §230 very much (although I'm not doing much work on it at the moment). One idea that I think is helpful here is that there are so many intermediaries that are involved in allowing you to communicate with someone.
People are already applying all kinds of pressure on each of those intermediaries; with weakened §230 protections, more of them would also be threatening litigation.
> in some sense I feel like the correct solution is force everyone to be a publisher
I also like this at some level, and I remember when I had my own web site hosted on my own desktop computer. (Some of my online communications are still hosted by my friend.) But I don't tend to think tinkering with intermediaries' incentives about content is the thing that will get us there, because there are so many other practical advantages that people have perceived in the more centralized services.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
The legislators who created §230 thought these incentives were bad, and wanted service operators to be able to choose to place themselves somewhere other than these two endpoints.