Henrique Carneiro

In April 2023, we published an overview of the BE-12, a benchmark survey conducted every five years by the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (“BEA”) to gather information about foreign direct investment in the United States. BEA also conducts surveys to gather information about United States direct investment abroad. The purpose of this post is to discuss one of those surveys, the BE-11, which has just gone live on BEA’s website and whose due date is approaching on May 31, 2024.

In an unsigned per curiam opinion yesterday in Gonzalez v. Google, the U.S. Supreme Court vacated the Ninth Circuit’s judgment— which had held that plaintiffs’ complaint was barred by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act – and remanded it. But the Court’s opinion entirely skirted a highly-anticipated issue: whether Section 230 does, in fact, shelter as much activity as courts have held to date.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act was originally thought of as “force for securing decency on the Internet,” as the late Judge Robert A. Katzmann of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit explained in a dissenting opinion in the 2019 Force v. Facebook Inc. case.

But its enactment under Title 47 of the U.S. Code, Section 230 also represented a commitment to the preservation of “the vibrant and competitive free market.”[2]

The free market ideal — explicitly codified in the statute — has taken prominence over the decent-internet ideal, and Section 230 has become the most powerful legal protection for online platforms that rely on content created or shared by others.