In the early days of the commercial internet, back in the mid 1990s, one of the things that technology platform companies lobbied hard for was the notion that they were like the town square — passive conduits for the actions of others, facilitating a variety of activities and thoughts, but not responsible for any of them. The idea was that the garage entrepreneurs starting message boards and chat rooms, or the nascent search engines, simply did not have the legal or economic bandwidth to monitor or be liable for the actions of users, and that to require them to do so would stymie the development of the internet itself.
回顾上世纪90年代中期，那是商业互联网的早期，提供网络平台服务的科技公司大力游说这样一个概念——它们就像是市镇广场，是被动承载他人行动的通道，为各种活动和思想交流提供便利，但不对其中任何活动负责。这里的理念是，这些从车库起家、创办了留言板、聊天室乃至当时新生的搜索引擎的创业家们，根本没有监测用户行为或者为其负责的法律或者manbetx20客户端下载 “带宽”，而要求他们这么做将会扼杀互联网本身的发展。