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verned. The United States, which was the first country to enforce an Internet defamation case in the early 1990’s [33] , appears to reject the UK’s pro-plaintiff approach and rather adopts a much more favourable and supportive position towards ISPs.

Compuserve [34] was one of the principal US cases adopting libel law to an ISP rather than other traditional media [35] . In this case, the Court found no difficulty in establishing that a defamatory post in the ‘online library’ provided by Compuserve could not by any means give birth to liability upon the ISP. A few years later however, in a case with a similar set of facts, the US Courts adopted a conflicting view. In Prodigy [36] , the fact that the defendant concerned promoted itself as a new style-orientated ISP and asserted that he exercised editorial control over the content [37] had been fatal to his liability. Based on its capacity to filter the content of its site, the Court ruled that Prodigy was a ‘publisher’ and was therefore found liable for the online defamatory statements.

The inconsistency between the common law cases gave rise to s.230 of the Communications Decency Act 1996, which essentially overruled the Stratton Oakmont decision which found the ISP to be liable for the online defamation claim [38] . According to s.230(c), “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” [39] .

It follows then, that since the enactment of this provision in 1996, the ISPs enjoy complete immunity as far as defamation on the Internet is concerned. However, the actual effect of this provision can only be apprehended through its application. Most notably, in the case of Zeran v. American Online, Inc [40] , the Court acknowledged that one of the main purposes of s.230 was, to an important extent, to preserve the vigorous nature of the online communication. As Chief Justice Wilkinson pointed out, it was a policy choice of the Congress to immunise service providers, and not to restrict harmful online speech through imposing libellous liability upon ISPs, since countenancing such liability would have presented the ISPs with undue and unfair burdens [41] . Moreover, the Courts in Zeran observed that the Congress’ intention in respect of the enactment of s.230 was to promote self-regulation by ISPs themselves in respect of defamatory content over their services [42] .

More importantly, when the issue of online defamation arose in the 1998 case of Blumenthal [43] , Judge Freeman took the opportunity to emphasise that the effect of the enactment of the s.230 provision was that ISPs are free from liability ‘even where the interactive service provider has an active, even aggressive role in making available content prepared by others’ [44] . It seems that after the ruling in Stratton, the court was not slow to appreciate the ‘chilling effect’ that a harsh attitude towards ISPs as regards defamatory statements may have on online communication. The US Congress statutory respo本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。