The Supreme Court tossed out a billion-dollar verdict against an internet service provider (ISP) on Wednesday, in a closely watched case that could have severely damaged many Americans’ access to the internet if it had gone the other way.
Wednesday’s decision in Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment is part of a broader pattern. It is one of a handful of recent Supreme Court cases that threatened to break the internet — or, at least, to fundamentally harm its ability to function as it has for decades. In each case, the justices took a cautious and libertarian approach. And they’ve often done so by lopsided margins. All nine justices joined the result in Cox, although Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson criticized some of the nuances of Justice Clarence Thomas’s majority opinion.
Some members of the Court have said explicitly that this wary approach stems from a fear that they do not understand the internet well enough to oversee it. As Justice Elena Kagan said in a 2022 oral argument, “we really don’t know about these things. You know, these are not like the nine greatest experts on the internet.”
It’s worth reading the whole article. It’s an example of how the internet touches everything and everything touches the internet. The folks who are making decisions – about regulation but also about financing or use, both for the howl community or just themselves, their families or even their classrooms – are not necessarily the greatest experts on the internet.