This one sentence altered the course of internet history:

Can you imagine an internet without Facebook and Twitter? How about YouTube and Tumblr, eBay and Yelp, or any other service that lets the public comment on politics, create content and share their thoughts?

For starters, it would be pretty boring!

But, more importantly, it would mean over a trillion dollars of value missing from our economy, fewer good jobs, fewer opportunities to stay connected, and fewer ways to debate ideas and organize political movements.

19 years ago, I fought hard to add this one sentence to the laws regulating the internet:

“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.”

And I’m glad we did. This sentence allowed sites that rely on user-generated content to pop up and grow exponentially – without fear of lawsuits.

As David Post put it recently in the Washington Post: “It is impossible to imagine what the internet ecosystem would look like today without it.”

Read about this fascinating piece of internet history and share it with your friends!

We were thinking about the future in 1996, and we wanted to keep the doors of innovation open. That’s what we should be doing today – not kicking the can down the road with short-term fixes, lurching from crisis to crisis.

As long as I’m in Congress, I’ll always fight to keep the internet free and open, and I know you’re with me.

Thank you,

Ron