What does the legal system have to do with companies deciding whats happening on their platforms? Do you want to force all companies to treat all content the same if it's not illegal?

Of course companies have the rights to remove and restrict content on their platforms! I'm not saying that's a problem.

I'm talking about e.g. the DMCA requirements than an OSP be responsible for complying with takedown notices. This is not the company deciding to take action on certain content, but the company being forced to take action in response to certain submissions. The law pushes the burden of enforcement onto a private company.

As someone else posted in the comments, there are services that will go around and make (bogus) claims on your behalf. It seems plausible that's what happened to the author's original article, rather than that bing and google themselves were trying to influence the net neutrality conversations.

oh ok. I misinterpreted that. Yeah DMCA needs to change and complaints about right holders should go through courts.

It seems pretty straightforward to me that if you want to reduce false or flimsy take down requests that there need to be actual costs when those requests are found to be fair use, parody, what have you. In the current environment there is basically zero reason for a rights holder to not claim content on YouTube (cited both because it's what I'm most familiar with, and because it's rampant issue on the platform) and literally claiming copyright on any video by a rights holder is a completely risk free action:

* YouTube seemingly does not weight the claim based on previous claims, i.e. if you've made hundreds of claims that have later petered out into nothing, you can still make claims that still have the same weight and assumption of good faith applied to them. So if one of your interns flips through a video and sees a frame of your show or game or whatever, claim it.

* As I've complained about here previously: videos make the vast majority of their revenue in the first few days of publication, so if you manage to snipe a newly posted video, either by way of keeping an eye open for yourself or via automated tools, you can claim it, have the video's monetization redirected to you, and again, even if the claim is later found to be bogus or unsubstantiated, you keep the money.

* Lastly, there is NO mechanism whatsoever for the creator to seek any form of justice on the platform. In theory a creator could sue an IP holder for filing a bogus claim, but there's little court precedent for that, and to even attempt it would require them to retain their own attorney. Any attorney worth their money would tell them not to try it because it will be an uphill battle with an organization who's legal account dwarfs their own.

This is basically a system that is directly incentivizing bad actors. It's no surprise at all that it's being abused by companies looking to manage their image/PR by quelling criticism, by organizationally inept companies who's left hands can't keep track of what the right hand is doing, and by companies that see it as a cynical way to juice their revenue in an ethically dubious but also basically risk free way. And we now have a new strata of yet more middle men organizations: companies that manage the IP of other companies and make claims on their behalf, sometimes even using shoddy AI recognition to manage it.