Part of life is that unless you live miles from others and hunt, forage and fish, you are pretty much always relying on the goodwill of others. I don’t want to start designating some corporations as special just because we happen to like their service a lot, and part of just how unspecial they are is they remain mere private entities carrying out their own activities including enforcing their own property rights.

Repubs always hated public broadcasting, championing the free market to take care of journalism. Companies think Trump is toxic for their brand- surprised pikachu.

I'm not really championing public broadcasting here either.

But in an internet-enabled world, in a country that values the right to free speech, there should be wholly unbiased platform that allows anyone to promote their speech to anyone else who wants to listen, as long as it is not speech that is already considered illegal (as decided by the courts, not unnamed corporate arbiters of truth).

People keep making the argument that "free speech isn't the same as right to have a platform / be signal boosted" or whatever, and I think that was true in the past. When the most you could do to broadcast was stand on the street corner and yell out your speech, that idea applied. But in this day and age, information flow is so strong that someone who has their broadcasting ability cut off effectively has their speech cut off.

Imagine trying to exercise your free speech in a world where, whenever you tried to say something, there was someone there to just yell 1000x louder than you so that you were totally drowned out. In a world where so much of our communication is happening over internet channels, this is essentially what we're talking about when we "deplatform" someone.

It is still possible to register a domain name, run a web host, and present your speech to the unbiased, (nearly) global, public internet.

If you will indulge a bit of doomsaying, three recent trends should be more worrying to you:

- The current administration's actions against net neutrality

- ISP terms of use clauses against running any kind of server on "residential" connections

- "unlimited [insert streaming service] included!" data plans

Debate over where twitter should ban any users is wasteful bike-shedding in the conversation around modern communication.

Are you familiar with the comedy of horrors that late night public access broadcast was? Not saying it shouldn't be done, but let's set realistic expectations: nobody is going to want to use a government website to exercise their speech, especially because of the types of speech it will be used by. (Unappealing, basically.)