LEHI — Free speech online is in some ways as free-wheeling as the Internet itself. When a news reporter falsely calls a hotel a "fleabag," the hotel can go after both reporter and publication or news station. If it's said in the broad online universe, with its blogs and reviews and millions of sites, it has to seek relief from the individual who said it, not the site where it appeared.

Online, "you are liable only for your own content," Paul Alan Levy, a public-interest attorney at Public Citizen, said Friday at the Utah State Bar's Cyber Symposium 2009 at Thanksgiving Point.

The immunity is part of the Communications Decency Act and "this provision is an essential part of free speech," Levy said.

Congress has extended protection not just to Web hosts but to Internet service and e-mail providers, among others. Think of them as the paperboy who dropped the newspaper on the porch or the folks running the printing press, who are not held liable for content.

"Congress chose an approach that allows (sites to exercise) discretion but absolves them from liability," Levy said. It's an acknowledgment there's too much material for any service provider to be the "publisher" and analyze all the content. And it protects "the vibrant free market that exists" online.

The act does not protect against federal criminal liability or allow intellectual property right violations. And even an interactive computer service provider can be held liable "to the extent that information is information that it provided." So a site isn't blamed for discriminatory content in an open-ended comment box but might be for discriminatory questions it asks users to answer, for example. And someone can sue the individual who made the comment.

"Congress neither made providers of interactive computer services common carriers, obligated to carry all without exception, nor made them liable for the content they carry," he wrote in a session hand-out. "In allowing discretion to screen out offensive and actionable matter, Congress chose to protect providers from legal consequences for the screening choices they make or don't make — Congress trusted the market to punish providers whose services carry too much offensive matter."

There are nuances. For example, if a site host promises to remove offensive material so you won't talk to the media or legislators about it, then doesn't, it might be immune to a claim based on one legal tenet but not another.