[Jack Goldsmith and I will have an article out about the Dormant Commerce Clause, geolocation, and state regulations of Internet transactions in the Texas Law Review early next year, and I'm serializing it here. There is still plenty of time for editing, so we'd love to hear any recommendations you folks might have; in the meantime, you can read the entire PDF of the latest draft (though with some formatting glitches stemming from the editing process) here.]
Let's now consider how these principles might apply to state regulations of social media platforms, and in particular to statutes (whether framed as public accommodations statutes or quasi-common-carrier statutes) that ban discrimination based on various attributes of a user or of the user's speech. We'll begin with two relatively simple and narrow hypotheticals, and then turn in a later post to the more controversial and ambitious statutes aimed at forbidding certain kinds of political discrimination, such as the ones recently enacted in Florida and Texas.
Antidiscrimination Statutes: Status
