https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200728/00241644990/ntia-follows-trumps-unconstitutional-order-to-request-fcc-review-section-230.shtml

As we mentioned on Friday, on Monday, the NTIA followed through on a key part of Trump's executive order on Section 230, asking the FCC to weigh in on interpreting the law. Everything about this is crazy. The NTIA request was almost certainly written by a recently hired lawyer who has spent the last couple of years attacking Section 230. He's also the same lawyer who sued Twitter on behalf of a white supremacist, and when I had reached out to him over email to ask him how that made sense under 230, insisted to me that Section 230 was a narrow statute that only applied if it was about protecting children. I can't say for sure, but my email exchange with him suggested to me that he was wholly unaware of Section 230 prior to me asking about it. Either way, that case failed spectacularly, and Adam Candeub has spent the past two years attacking 230 on various panels. And now he's deputy secretary at NTIA in charge of this issue.

The petition to the FCC is performative nonsense, just like the Executive Order that preceded it. The FCC has no authority over internet edge providers. It has no authority to interpret Section 230. That's for the courts. And if Congress doesn't like how the courts have interpreted the law, then it's on Congress to change the law. The FCC has literally no authority at all to deal with this issue. And, you would think that since we're living in an era where the current FCC, under Chair Ajit Pai, has been literally giving away whatever authority the FCC actually has regarding the area it does have oversight concerning (namely internet access providers), that it would take a similar hands off approach to the NTIA request. Unfortunately that doesn't seem likely.