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The Supreme Court is scared it’s going to break the internet

This is a good thing.

The Supreme Court tossed out a billion-dollar verdict against an internet service provider (ISP) on Wednesday, in a closely watched case that could have severely damaged many Americans’ access to the internet if it had gone the other way.

Wednesday’s decision in Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment is part of a broader pattern. It is one of a handful of recent Supreme Court cases that threatened to break the internet — or, at least, to fundamentally harm its ability to function as it has for decades. In each case, the justices took a cautious and libertarian approach. And they’ve often done so by lopsided margins. All nine justices joined the result in Cox, although Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson criticized some of the nuances of Justice Clarence Thomas’s majority opinion.

Get the latest developments on the US Supreme Court from senior correspondent Ian Millhiser.

Some members of the Court have said explicitly that this wary approach stems from a fear that they do not understand the internet well enough to oversee it. As Justice Elena Kagan said in a 2022 oral argument, “we really don’t know about these things. You know, these are not like the nine greatest experts on the internet.”

Thomas’s opinion in Cox does a fine job of articulating why this case could have upended millions of Americans’ ability to get online. The plaintiffs were major music companies who, in Thomas’s words, have “struggled to protect their copyrights in the age of online music sharing.” It is very easy to pirate copyrighted music online. And the music industry has fought online piracy with mixed success since the Napster Wars of the late 1990s.

Before bringing the Cox lawsuit, the music company plaintiffs used software that allowed them to “detect when copyrighted works are illegally uploaded or downloaded and trace the infringing activity to a particular IP address,” an identification number assigned to online devices. The software informed ISPs when a user at a particular IP address was potentially violating copyright law. After the music companies decided that Cox Communications, the primary defendant in Cox, was not doing enough to cut off these users’ internet access, they sued.

Two practical problems arose from this lawsuit. One is that, as Thomas writes, “many users can share a particular IP address” — such as in a household, coffee shop, hospital, or college dorm. Thus, if Cox had cut off a customer’s internet access........

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