Hat tip to HardOCP for the link to this provocative article about how corporations are censoring Internet speech for good, neutral, and malicious reasons:
NEW YORK - Rant all you want in a public park. A police officer generally won't eject you for your remarks alone, however unpopular or provocative.
Say it on the Internet, and you'll find that free speech and other constitutional rights are anything but guaranteed.
Companies in charge of seemingly public spaces online wipe out content that's controversial but otherwise legal. Service providers write their own rules for users worldwide and set foreign policy when they cooperate with regimes like China. They serve as prosecutor, judge and jury in handling disputes behind closed doors.
….
Users get caught in the crossfire as hundreds of individual service representatives apply their own interpretations of corporate policies, sometimes imposing personal agendas or misreading guidelines.
To wit: Verizon Wireless barred an abortion-rights group from obtaining a "short code" for conducting text-messaging campaigns, while LiveJournal suspended legitimate blogs on fiction and crime victims in a crackdown on pedophilia. Two lines criticizing President Bush disappeared from AT&T Inc.'s webcast of a Pearl Jam concert. All three decisions were reversed only after senior executives intervened amid complaints.
Inconsistencies and mysteries behind decisions lead to perceptions that content is being stricken merely for being unpopular.
"As we move more of our communications into social networks, how are we limiting ourselves if we can't see alternative points of view, if we can't see the things that offend us?" asked Fred Stutzman, a University of North Carolina researcher who tracks online communities.
Source: 'Public' online spaces don't carry speech, rights - Yahoo! News
It’s a tough problem to figure out. On the one hand, I certainly think companies shouldn’t be forced to host content on their servers that they disagree with. But the problem is that it’s almost impossible for an average citizen to have his or her own web presence that isn’t corporate controlled in some way or another. Even if you decide to forego buying a domain name and operate strictly off an IP address from a server you host in the home, you’re getting your Internet connection from a company that could decide to close your pipe if it disagrees with what you’re hosting.
It seems the only way one could truly be free of corporate influence is if the government offered free web hosting that censored only to the extent permitted by the First Amendment. Of course, that opens up an entire other can of worms, including constitutional challenges by those who see government-hosting of a website as governmental endorsement. Oh, and the little matter of whether our tax dollars should go for such a program.
As the Internet becomes more and more important, the public square is turning into a privately-owned square. How can we balance First Amendment rights with the rights of ISPs and other content providers?
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