Since this seems to be a popular topic, I thought some would be interested in Jeffrey Rosen's opinion:

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com...vW#more-111987

We can discuss this without actually getting political (by focusing on technology and philosophy), so please do!

It's funny, the biggest obstacle to free speech everywhere, is governments.

There are some similarities between the web and Radio Caroline, the Pirate radio station that broke down a lot of censorship present in radio in their time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Caroline

True Freedom is Scary!

Sometimes freedom is needed so people can make mistakes for other to learn from...

It's a general phenomenon not only tied to free speech. When the concept of human rights was born, it was - roughly - to protect citizens from those who had power. Those who had power were, of course, the administrations and their representatives. It was unthinkable at that time that any company could ever have more power than a state.

This has changed a lot. Today, the power is in the hands of a few selected multi-national companies. Legislations are being influenced by those companies. There's probably not one single western parliament that makes decisions without being exposed to lobbying.

Even worse, decisions that aren't and never will be subject to any law are made by companies ... and they influence your lives just as laws would. When facebook decides you must not place ads for your small business there, but all of your competitors may, they can well ruin you with that (if your business model required these ads).

So what we have today is the companies that threaten both individuals and administrations... plus a collection of basic human rights (such as free speech) that protects the individual from the administrations. Nobody's protecting anyone from those who have the power today: the companies; the capital.

My freedom to create another avenue for people to freely speak their minds will always be something never fully controllable by corporations. Even pretending for a moment the corporations get down to the media level and start controlling the wires and trying to prevent people from sending whatever data they want to and from servers, we are in a free market so smaller time competitors that fully allow freedoms to post/print whatever will rise to the top.

It's the beauty of a free market. If AT&T decided they were no longer going to allow X-type of content to travel their wires, then a bunch of us get together, and create Freenet, an ISP that simply provides a "dumb pipe" to send data over we would suddenly receive all the business.

YouTube is not the end-all, be-all of video sites on the Internet, and any censored content is easily obtainable at other places where they will not censor. As long as the free market remains open (as it should), the people will continue to be truly free as entrepreneurs will simply start up other means for people to freely express themselves.

If/when the electronic press is too censored, will print come back with a vengeance?

Doubt it. Much easier to run some wires and let people get on a new uncensored Internet.

Thank you Laughingstok. I think we are in perfect agreement. The free market will decide which companies will survive, and thus what free speech shall entail.

Ultimately, though, I think Education will play the most important role in the future of democracy and capitalism. A bunch of idiots trying to play with money does not equal a successful capitalist model nor a successful democracy.

That's what I want to believe, but don't.

Free markets just don't work. Take regulation away, and monopolies always emerge. A sad testament to human nature.

I'm more for Fair markets. There's where free speech can thrive. The facebooks of the world would rather have managed speech.

/me sees Jens and awaits disagreement

There have always been groups of people determined to shut you up. Sometimes in the form of governments, sometimes corporations, and sometimes angry mobs.

Funnily enough, our biggest stick against the latter two is the government. What we need is a better general appreciation of free speech. Sometimes it feels like the only thing moderating public opinion is a sportsteam-like dedication to the constitution/national identity, without understanding what it really means.


With venture capital, no doubt...

The real problem is not that we'd be unable to communicate. It's that most people would be unable to communicate. Right now, the average user isn't going to get off Facebook or Google no matter how much they start censoring themselves.

People act all indignant when corporations try to appease lunatics, but who are we kidding here - wouldn't you? If we truly want corporate products to respect freedom of speech, the decisionmakers need to be backed up by society. Now it's more like damned if you do, damned if you don't. Too many people will side with the complainers out of political correctness or actually agreeing with censorship of anything unpleasant to someone.

Don't expect balance any time soon though, because there's just as many people who think freedom of speech means the right to force people around you to listen to you. This, for example, is just total failure on all sides of the issue.