The tech world is going to have to decide pretty quickly what it wants to be: 1. A set of dumb pipes and a public square for information. Or 2. A curated community built for advertising where things that offend people are censored. Right now tech has chosen option 2, but in answer to any regulation it doesn't like, it pretends it has chosen option 1 and loudly screams "free speech". Tech is trying to have its cake an…
You can have both, and we largely already do. Interconnects and ISPs are largely dumb pipes. Individual websites can choose whether they're curated or shitshows. Sites like 4chan do exist, as well as other "wild wests" of freedom. Sites like facebook where the actual user curates their own information (via following or not certain people) do exist and seem to do particularly well. And on the final side, personal site…
I say we have not seen this recently. DNS and hosting providers are deciding that some websites are too offensive for them to host. DDOS protection providers, for example Cloudflare also the same. Search engines also now downgrade content that they view as extremist. Large social networks will censor user produced content that they find offensive. All these examples could be considered as modern infrastructure between the user and content generated by another user.
With the ongoing centralization of the internet, what is considered as infrastructure is going to have be more than just ISP's and Interconnects. The internet is no longer spread out over a billion websites. Probably 95% of content that people access is probably a few dozen sites at most, and the long tail of other sites is found through a search engine like Google. In addition, the ability to monetize a site is controlled by just a few companies. This has profound implications for the social principle of free speech.
True, these companies are private companies and thus are not bound to the laws of free speech as they are not a government entity. They are fully within their rights to determine who they provide service to. However, in decrying this regulation, they are appealing not to the law, but to the social principle of free speech. If they plan to appeal to the social principle of free speech in decrying certain regulations, they should be adhering to the social principle of free speech, or the public is going to get cynical fast.