>But when the limited collection of players in the system all act in concert to prevent access to opponents of their preferred political party, isn’t the effect nearly the same? Arguably worse, because there’s no legal recourse. I think that’s the point being made here.

What evidence can you provide to support your claim that various corporations are colluding to block folks?

What evidence can you provide that said corporations have a "preferred political party?"

You have no such evidence. What's more, whether or not the nebulous set of entities to which you refer (let's have specific names and specific actions).

I'd further say that "cloud" (read: someone else's servers) services, a few large social networking sites and a small subset of payment processors (I'm guessing that this is the set of corporations to which you were referring since you don't bother to be specific) do not constitute an "oligopoly."

I'd further add that there are hundreds of hosting and co-location providers, dozens of payment processors and a variety of mechanisms to share data, information and messaging.

I find your diatribe to be sorely lacking in evidence, reasoned argument and factual information.

Finally, your analogy concerning airlines is deeply flawed, as that isn't even close to what's going on.

Please provide some evidence for your claims.

Otherwise, I can only conclude that you are arguing in bad faith.