I agree, at least in principle, but it’s tricky. Where do you draw the line without denying operators editorial control of their content?
Leonard French lays it out with wonderful clarity here:
This is the system working as intended. However, it’s a bad model for the world we now live in. It worked fine when a single individual could hope to control the whole process, from cutting down the trees to distributing newspapers, and could muster hundreds of competing printing houses to diseminate his opinion. Now that you need access to several services, each controlled by two or three corporate entities, in order to break into a market already dominated by massive pseudo-monopolies, it doesn’t work at all. The end result is that the eye of the needle you need to thread in order to get your word out there, is getting smaller by the minute, and marignal opinions are being further marginalized. This isn’t really the root cause for the process I tried to bring up in “Why can’t we discuss politics…”, but it sure accelerates it.
For the record, I am of what inRange calls the “crypto-anarchist” school of thought, and believe that a proper solution enables people to communicate in a de-centralized manner where corporate or state restrictions on free speech are technically impossible. However, this is separate from the quite interesting question of how society chooses to deal with it.