You're right, it's an interesting phenomenon, but I don't think it's new. For better or worse, Facebook has become the primary (and often only) way I communicate with the majority of my friends and family. While there is certainly an important legal distinction between government censorship and private censorship, the effect here is indistinguishable.

And it's not the first time. The USA used to have rules governing how much of an area's media channels could be owned by a single corporation (and thus warped to serve a single set of interests.) There are strong parallels to this situation.

One of the effects of these Too Big/Entrenched To Replace corporations. It is often easier and more effective to change the corporations than to use alternatives, and in many cases, there simply are no viable alternatives.

The people on HN probably care more about having an open web that enables free-as-in-breastfeeding-pictures communication than it does about breastfeeding. One can choose to view this controversy in either context; I care about both, somewhat to my surprise.

(Actually, much of HN appears to care more about "you know what's cool? a hundred billion dollars" than open communication, but that's a different story.)