Supreme Court set to hear Google case that could impact free speech online
John Roberts, chief justice of the US Supreme Court, from left, Elena Kagan, associate justice of the US Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, associate justice of the US Supreme Court, Amy Coney Barrett, associate justice of the US Supreme Court, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, associate justice of the US Supreme Court, ahead of a State of the Union address at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, US, on Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2023.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments Tuesday in a potentially groundbreaking case with the potential to alter the force of a key law that the tech industry says has been critical to keeping the internet an open place that fosters free speech.
That case is known as Gonzalez v. Google, brought by the family of an American who died in a 2015 terrorist attack in Paris. The petitioners argued that Google and its subsidiary YouTube did not do enough to remove or stop promoting ISIS terrorist videos seeking to recruit members, which they argue is a violation of the Anti-Terrorism Act. In the lower courts, Google won on the basis that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act shields it from liability for what its users post on its platform.
Now that very shield is at stake as the petitioners argue it should not apply where Google actively promotes user-generated content, like through its recommendation algorithms.
Many lawmakers on both sides of the aisle would likely cheer a narrowing of Section 230, which has been under fire in Washington for years for reasons ranging from the belief it fuels alleged internet censorship to the conviction that it protects tech companies that do little to stop hate speech and misinformation on their platforms.
But tech platforms and many free speech experts warn that changing Section 230 will have broad implications for how the internet operates, incentivizing popular services to limit or slow down user posting to avoid being held liable for what they say.
“Without Section 230, some websites would be forced to overblock, filtering content that could create any potential legal risk, and might shut down some services altogether,” General Counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado wrote in a January blog post summarizing Google’s stance. “That would leave consumers with less choice to engage on the internet and less opportunity to work, play, learn, shop, create, and participate in the exchange of ideas online.”
Justice Clarence Thomas has previously written that the court should take up a case around Section 230, suggesting it’s been applied too broadly and that internet platforms should perhaps instead be regulated more like utilities due to their widespread use to share information.
The Supreme Court will also hear a separate tech case on Wednesday that could have implications for how platforms promote and remove speech on their sites. In Twitter v. Taamneh, the court will consider whether Twitter can be held accountable under the Anti-Terrorism Act for failing to remove terrorist content from its platform.
Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, attends the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit at the Grand Palais in Paris, Feb. 10, 2025.
Benoit Tessier | Reuters
Shares of Advanced Micro Devices slid more than 5% on Wednesday after the company said it could incur charges of up to $800 million for exporting its MI308 products to China and other countries.
“The Company expects to apply for licenses but there is no assurance that licenses will be granted,” AMD said in the filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The new U.S. license requirement, which applies to exports of certain semiconductor products, would hit inventory, purchase commitments and related reserves, AMD said in the filing.
AMD is one of the companies that builds the hardware behind the artificial intelligence boom. The company claims its AMD Instinct MI300 Series accelerators are “uniquely well-suited to power even the most demanding AI and HPC workloads,” according to its website.
It generated a “record” revenue of $25.8 billion in 2025, according to its February earnings release, but the new export restrictions could slow growth.
AMD one month stock chart.
Nvidia, an AMD competitor, released a similar disclosure on Tuesday. The company said it will take a quarterly charge of about $5.5 billion for exporting H20 graphics processing units.
China is Nvidia’s fourth-largest region by sales, after the U.S., Singapore, and Taiwan, according to the company’s annual report. More than half of its sales went to U.S. companies in its fiscal year that ended in January.
–CNBC’s Kif Leswing and Jordan Novet contributed to this report.
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