How everything online is private property dependant on a huge number of other parties.
This causes two major issues:
1. Your private platform can be taken away at the whim of a large company or ten, simply because your enemies made a big fuss about your beliefs on social media. If your reputation gets bad enough (or the false threats to the host or registrar common enough), 99% of companies will simply cut ties rather than do the right thing.
2. All platforms being privately owned means there's no way to get a message out if it's disliked by either the powerful people that own said platforms or a large percentage of the population.
Real life doesn't have these issues, because:
A. Public property is mostly unavoidable, allows freedom of speech and basically comes with a built in audience. Protests in the middle of the street or a public park have a guaranteed audience and cannot be blocked simply because one or more groups of people dislike the message.
B. Private property is truly owned by you, with the government generally not being able to kick you out because people complained about your views.
The internet's real freedom of speech issue is that everything is rented and nothing is truly either 'owned' or 'public'.
I agree to an extent, but part of ownership is having the ability to rent it out. Without the incentive to extract rent, there would be no motive to accrue the large amount of infrastructure which has given us such incredibly low costs and high efficiency. This has reduced barriers to entry for the average individual to operate blogs, personal pages, online businesses, and more. I can't think of a better time for free speech.
"Real life" is not as different as you think from what's going on right now. There's a reason that you see the exercise of free speech (peaceful, lawful demonstrations) in public spaces: private individuals should be secure in their private property from the intrusions of others into their otherwise private affairs. You can't just violate someone's private property against their will or you'll face legal consequences. Corporations are legally recognized persons (like it or not, established law in US), and are entitled to similar property rights, including the same right that I use to lawfully rent out my residential property when I'd otherwise be taking a loss on it while not living there.
Specifically, though, you seem focused on the rent aspect of the property issue, and (if I'm reading your argument correctly) are concerned that large corporations seeking rent are a threat to free speech. It's strange that you contrast "Real Life" to the one in which corporations don't have similar property rights. You're making an unnecessary distinction between "online" and "real life"; ownership rights extend to everything digital, and a corporation has no less a right to own infrastructure (servers, cables, routers, etc.) or software than an individual.
And why should they? Individuals can't deliver the scale and efficiency that large corporations regularly do. Corporations such as AWS have brought us into an unprecedented time in which there is no shortage of ways for individuals to exercise their free speech--due entirely to their desire as a corporation to make profit from seeking rent.
The endgame of your argument is nationalization. It hinges on some cabal of powerful people doing powerful things to powerless people, which of course we need the government to protect us from. Some well-meaning, but onerous regulations are enacted to appease an irrational fear, and smaller competitors are pushed out while large corporations increase their market share. While you recognize that there is a "huge number of other parties" in the market, you fail to see that you are proposing a self-fulfilling prophecy in that even smaller numbers of "powerful people" will control vast swaths of infrastructure. Of course, it logically follows for the government to protect us again from the "powerful people" when they inevitable suffer the back-end of the business cycle, either by nationalizing the infrastructure outright or seizing ownership of large portions of it through. Or you could consider a bailout of some sort, but we are pretty far from the healthy market conditions that exist if we're discussing bailing out tech companies.
While well-meaning, your argument would result in the exact opposite of its stated purpose of protecting free speech. I can't imagine that allowing the US--not exactly considered a bastion of civil liberties by the crowd on here--to nationalize infrastructure would result in a net positive for free speech around the world.
The internet and the physical world are fundamentally different. Anyone can make a new website to espouse their views, rather than use an existing website. I think the premise is flawed.
The article explicitly addresses that response - you can't just "make a new website" - you need a domain from a registrar and you need a place to host your content - both of which are private companies which can refuse to keep doing business with you.
You do not NEED domain nor third party hosting service, you just need access to the Internet. Obviously you are still relying that your ISP doesn't cut you off or censor you.
Then why does it need to even be a website? IRC has been a thing for a long time, the protocol is simple to implement and anyone can setup a server, and once on a server anyone can make a channel. Sure at the end of the day you still need Internet access or you have to rely someone else doesn't ban you from their server/network, but if you go down this rabbit hole then you are relying on the power company to provide you with electricity and your government not to police/censor you.
There already exists ideas (if not solutions) about distributed ham radio "dark webs" which would go around the ISP issue, but even then someone could just blast the air ways with random noise which would disable the network or at least slow it down to crawl. At some point you have to accept some amount of "risk", since you literally can not control for everything.
You don't even need the internet, you can just whisper to yourself inside your head.
Obviously you're relying on the power company and relying on the government of your own country to not lock you up - which brings us back to the public spaces where people can rant on street corners without being locked up - being heard by random passers by. Those same people can't rant on the internet in the same way without being banned from the sites where people might be able to discover them. A dark web site is only useful for speech if you have some way to be discovered.
Hmmm, I'm not sure I see this as a problem. Isn't China a good enough example that having a government controlled Internet doesn't really solve any of these issues, but in fact makes them worse?
I understand the issue that corporations can do unexpected things, but at least, in a much shorter span of time, corporations who consistently bad decisions for their users end up dying, supplanted, or worked around.
But let's imagine we had a totally anonymous, fully sponsored portion of the internet, what would stop it from being used for child porn, spamming, and propagating fake news?
And even if we could somehow regulate it and not encroach on anyone's freedom and/or privacy, that doesn't guarantee that the government won't just change the regulation rules every 4-8 years.
The upside to corporations is that if one screws up, then at least, theoretically, there are options.
I guess my overall feeling is that there's no such thing as free speech, at least not in the sense the author means it (as im reading it, which could be my bad).
As a member of a society, we all agree to abide by certain standards. So I think no matter whether it's authoritarians in a corporate suit, or a bureaucrat's, it leads to the same general dissatisfaction, but at least with a corporation, you can let your dollars (or ad views, membership, whatever) vote for you.
I've been thinking for a while now that there should be some sort of public access social network, just like with television. It would be a proactive state-funded effort to promote genuinely free discussion without fear of being censored (or tracked and advertised to.)
Of course it's hard to imagine a current state being on board with something like that. Especially the no tracking part.
It would need to somehow be 100% anonymous in order to get around every last bit of censorship (because last point is self-censorship, when you see others with your views being ostracized by rest of user base)
> On the internet on the other hand, that’s not the case. There are pretty much no communal or ‘neutral’ spaces. There are no sites which aren’t classed as the private ‘property’ of someone or some group.
Exactly what I was thinking. Does this still exist in some meaningful form? We used to have an amazing thing there... I remember before Endless September. alt.* was about as free as it gets.
Usenet is still up and running. There's a public news server at "news.eternal-september.org". Serious groups such as "sci.electronics.design" and "comp.lang.python" get heavy traffic. Eternal September doesn't host the alt binary groups; too much junk.
Google Groups is a Usenet node. Posting to Google Groups will result in Usenet distribution, and posting with NNTP to a Usenet node will show up on Google Groups.
How everything online is private property dependant on a huge number of other parties.
This causes two major issues:
1. Your private platform can be taken away at the whim of a large company or ten, simply because your enemies made a big fuss about your beliefs on social media. If your reputation gets bad enough (or the false threats to the host or registrar common enough), 99% of companies will simply cut ties rather than do the right thing.
2. All platforms being privately owned means there's no way to get a message out if it's disliked by either the powerful people that own said platforms or a large percentage of the population.
Real life doesn't have these issues, because:
A. Public property is mostly unavoidable, allows freedom of speech and basically comes with a built in audience. Protests in the middle of the street or a public park have a guaranteed audience and cannot be blocked simply because one or more groups of people dislike the message.
B. Private property is truly owned by you, with the government generally not being able to kick you out because people complained about your views.
The internet's real freedom of speech issue is that everything is rented and nothing is truly either 'owned' or 'public'.