The Supreme Court will hear arguments this week in two cases that could determine the future of Big Tech companies, but some legal experts say the judicial branch is "ill-matched" for it.
Historically, the high court has struggled when it comes to new technology. As it wades into the conflict over social-media algorithms, there's concern that the justices could unintentionally create more problems than they solve.
"The court might think it's doing one thing and it's actually doing something very different," Evelyn Douek, a law professor at Stanford who specializes in tech law, told Axios. "It's ill-matched to the problem."
The two lawsuits the court is scheduled to hear involve Section 230, the federal law that shields technology platforms from liability for content their users post.
While one lawsuit was filed against Google and the other was filed against Twitter, both complaints argue that tech companies should be held liable for what their algorithms promote or suggest, according to Axios.
The prospect of a Supreme Court ruling limiting Section 230 is alarming to those within the tech industry because it could result in unintended consequences.
According to Berin Szóka, president of libertarian-leaning think tank TechFreedom, even if Google and Twitter win, the court could still say "problematic things … that end up weaponizing the legal system against court moderation."
"There is a valid concern that the Court may simply not understand nor appreciate the technical complexities that drive the modern web," Jess Miers, a lawyer for the pro-tech Chamber of Progress, wrote last week.
As an innately slow-moving institution, the Supreme Court generally tries to solve problems with one durable, overarching principle — an approach that is quickly rendered obsolete by ever-evolving technology.
In 1979, the court ruled that law enforcement does not require a warrant to obtain a list of the phone numbers you've called because you voluntarily gave that information to a third party, the phone company. There is therefore no reasonable expectation to privacy, the court said.
The 1979 ruling about landline phones might have seemed narrow, but the court has grappled with how to adapt its "third-party doctrine" to the cellphone era, in which third parties have access to all of our information and the concept of privacy has been called into question by the tracking capabilities of cellphones and other mobile electronic devices.
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