Telecoms say they have a First Amendment right to sell private data

I imagine if historically cable tv and phone were transmitted by the same technology or company, there would only be one company allowed access. Since these were historically separate, they are granted access to the poles. Technically this is not a monopoly given that there are two different providers. It is monopolistic in my view. I have yet to live in an area that has more than two companies with pole access.

This is an especially pernicious case of the normal Stockholm Syndrome we see whenever the special status of corporations is challenged. No firm is 100% robots yet. If we withdraw our consent, they have to raise wages and improve working conditions until we relent.

Demand is far too overstating it. And I'm not proposing or demanding it become law. There's a bunch of side-effects we might not like.

But let's go with it anyway:

Freedom of speech is different from freedom of the press. But both are linked because the amendment was written to allow for people to record their grievances to government via a free press. This is why free press was linked - people wanted their speech recorded in print and it was seen that government might legislate this out of existence or otherwise restrict it.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

Notice that people can obviously operate a press without congress outlawing it.

Care to show me where a corporation gets free speech from? Not from that amendment. It comes from law around granting corporations the status of "legal person". This was necessary to allow a group of people to operate a business and have the business be liable, make contracts etc instead of the group.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_person

If you want to imply corporations have freedom of the press and therefore freedom of speech thats the only angle you have if you reject "legal person". Freedom of press is the ability to print. My fictional judge would accept that printed page as "from the corporate entity". But its still not speech: That judge would then ask the corporate entity to speak it.

As for a corporation actually being able to speak or print. The entity can own a printer. So it can "speak" via the press. But it can't actually talk without a proxy. No actual mouth nor was it born with one nor would it could presumably be seen to even possibly have been born with one. This covers the case where some clever lawyer might bring up exceptions for birth deformity as a reason for granting something without speech actual free speech.

But in reality its all moot: "legal person" is already a thing. And it overrides all of this. Until it doesn't I guess but that is unlikely.

The more astute would just say that any of these conditions would have to be put into law and the amendment prevents that. So, its still moot. Unless you determine that legal entities aren't actually people but only narrowly defined as people for particular reasons.