Are you a Department of Justice investigator probing anti-competitive practices in real estate? Fantastic. Let’s go to school…
In 1996, Rep. Chris Cox (R-CA) and Rep. Ron Wyden (D-OR) proposed an eleventh-hour addition to Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act of 1996.
"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider…No cause of action may be brought and no liability may be imposed under any state or local law that is inconsistent with this section.”
The Act passed the House and was signed into law. Subsequently, the National Association of Realtors (“NAR”), through its affiliated Multiple Listing Service (“MLS”), used Section 230 as a weapon to achieve its principal business objective:
Provide compensation to realtors by increasing market sales volume, by suppressing prices, and extracting seller equity, by dispossessing sellers of their state land rights.
Of all the predatory business models created by Section 230, this one is the worst of the worst. The play-by-play will help you get the picture.
5. On the phone, the MLS will hold out as a government agency, lecturing the seller on “ethics rules” and “transparency” while paying zero regard for the seller’s state constitution rights, which are “absolute”. In legal correspondence, and in court, the MLS will call itself a “republisher” having Section 230 protections.
Note that in 2013, the Attorneys General of 47 states sent a letter to Congress requesting that the criminal and civil immunity in Section 230 be removed. After all, the intention of Congress in creating Section 230 was not to give tortfeasors the absolute right to permanently injure victims and preclude any effective remedy under any state’s law.