Ron Wyden

Ron Wyden has represented Oregon in Congress since 1981. Congress’s own directory records that he was born in Wichita, Kansas, on 3 May 1949, graduated from Palo Alto High School in 1967, took a B.A. in political science with distinction from Stanford in 1971 and a J.D. from the University of Oregon Law School in 1974, directed Oregon Legal Services for the Elderly, and cofounded and codirected the Oregon Gray Panthers from 1974 to 1980. He was elected to the 97th Congress on 4 November 1980 and reelected to each succeeding Congress, then elected to the Senate on 6 February 1996 in the special election to fill the unexpired term of Senator Bob Packwood. In the 117th Congress he chaired the Finance Committee, served as vice chair of the Joint Committee on Taxation, and sat on Budget, Energy and Natural Resources, and the Select Committee on Intelligence.

Section 230

On 30 June 1995, while Wyden was a member of the House, Representative Christopher Cox of California introduced H.R. 1978 “for himself and Mr. Wyden.” The bill, titled the Internet Freedom and Family Empowerment Act, ran to a few pages and would have added a new section 230 to the Communications Act of 1934. Its core sentence — “No provider or user of interactive computer services shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by an information content provider” — survives in the law today, and the bill also carried the findings and policy statements that still open the section, including the declaration that interactive computer services “have flourished, to the benefit of all Americans, with a minimum of government regulation.”

The text reached the statute book as an amendment rather than as a standalone bill. On 4 August 1995 the House adopted it during consideration of H.R. 1555, the Communications Act of 1995, by a recorded vote of 420 ayes to 4 noes. Speaking for the amendment, Wyden said the Internet was “the shining star of the information age, and Government censors must not be allowed to spoil its promise,” and argued that “parents and families are better suited to guard the portals of cyberspace and protect our children than our Government bureaucrats.” He brought commercially available filtering software onto the House floor to make the point that parents could already “child-proof the family computer” with private-sector products. He framed the amendment explicitly against the Senate’s approach, which he said would have the federal government spend “vast sums of money trying to define elusive terms” and invite “a flood of legal challenges while our kids are unprotected.”

Both approaches were enacted. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 became law on 8 February 1996; its title V is the Communications Decency Act, and section 509 of that title, headed “Online family empowerment,” is the Cox-Wyden text. Wyden has since described section 230 as “the one piece of the law left standing” after the rest of the Communications Decency Act was struck down by the Supreme Court.

Holds on COICA and the PROTECT IP Act

Wyden publishes a statement in the Congressional Record whenever he places a hold on legislation. On 29 November 2010 he used that mechanism against S. 3804, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, writing that the bill “could trample free speech and stifle competition and important new innovations in the digital economy,” and that the powers it gave the Department of Justice would give “license to foreign regimes to further censor and filter online content to serve protectionist commercial motives and repressive political aims.”

He repeated the objection against the successor bill. On 26 May 2011 he announced his intention to object to any unanimous consent request to proceed to S. 968, the PROTECT IP Act, introduced two weeks earlier by Senator Patrick Leahy. He wrote that he agreed with the goal of protecting intellectual property but was “not willing to muzzle speech and stifle innovation and economic growth to achieve this objective,” and that “the collateral damage of this approach is speech, innovation and the very integrity of the Internet.”

The bill did not reach a vote. A cloture vote on the motion to proceed had been scheduled for 24 January 2012; on 23 January, Majority Leader Reid asked unanimous consent that the cloture motion “be vitiated,” and there was no objection. That evening Wyden spoke on the floor with Senator Jerry Moran, thanking Reid “for reopening the debate” and for “pulling the Protect IP Act from the floor.” He named Moran, Senator Maria Cantwell and Senator Rand Paul as allies in the effort, and referred back to “the filibuster I announced here in the Senate almost 1 1/2 years ago.” He also gave the floor a set of participation figures for the previous week’s online protest — that 8 million of 162 million Wikipedia visitors had taken action, that 7 million had signed a Google petition, and that more than 15 million Americans had contacted Congress in a single day. Those are his assertions on the Senate floor, not independently audited counts.

Surveillance Oversight

Wyden has sat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. At the committee’s open threat hearing on 12 March 2013, he put a question to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper about a statement the NSA director had made at a conference the previous summer — “The story that we have millions, or hundreds of millions, of dossiers on people is completely false.” Wyden asked for a yes or no answer to “does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions, or hundreds of millions, of Americans?” Clapper answered, “No, sir,” and, pressed, added, “Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly.” Wyden said he would submit further questions in writing. The exchange is printed in the committee’s hearing record as S. Hrg. 113-89.

Opposition to FOSTA-SESTA

On 21 March 2018 the Senate passed H.R. 1865, the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, by 97 yeas to 2 nays. The bill amended the Communications Act to clarify that section 230 does not bar enforcement of federal and state law relating to sexual exploitation of children or sex trafficking. The roll call records Wyden and Senator Rand Paul as the only two votes against.

In his floor statement Wyden said he was “in firm agreement with my colleagues that the Congress must do more to combat the scourge of sex trafficking,” but that he feared the bill “is going to do more to take down ads than to take down traffickers” and would push traffickers “to the shadowy corners of the dark web.” He compared the debate to the one over the Communications Decency Act two decades earlier, and defended the provision he had co-written on the ground that it was “never about protecting the incumbents”: “When I wrote this policy, I never envisioned a Facebook, but I did hope it would give the little guy and his startup a chance to grow into something big.”

What Is Not Established Here

The page as it stood was a two-sentence stub, correct in outline. Two points of framing have been made more precise. First, Section 230 was not written as part of the Communications Decency Act: it originated as a separate House bill, H.R. 1978, and was adopted as a floor amendment to the House telecommunications bill on 4 August 1995, in explicit opposition to the Senate approach that became the CDA. The two were joined only when the conference bill placed the Cox-Wyden text at section 509 of title V. Second, the page’s phrase “co-authored Section 230 with Chris Cox” is supported by the bill’s introduction line and by Wyden’s own 2018 floor statement, but the bill was introduced by Cox “for himself and Mr. Wyden” — Cox is the sponsor of record. Whether other members later joined as cosponsors was not checked, because the introduced text is the only version reachable through govinfo.

Not established and therefore not stated here: any account of Wyden’s role in the drafting of the amendment beyond what the introduction line and his own floor remarks record; any characterisation of his political position; the widely reported announcement by Majority Leader Reid on 20 January 2012 that the PIPA vote would be postponed, which could not be reached through any first-party source in this pass because senate.gov and bioguide.congress.gov refuse automated clients — the Senate’s own proceedings of 23 January 2012 are used instead; and Wyden’s activity on encryption, export controls, tax policy and health care, which is outside the scope of this page and was not researched. The participation figures for the January 2012 protest are attributed to Wyden rather than asserted, and his 2012 statement that he had placed the COICA hold “in December” of 2010 is superseded here by the Record itself, which dates the notice 29 November 2010.