A company with significant coercive power (through sticky market effects) is much better thought of as a governmentesque censoring entity rather than some mere group of individuals exercising their individual speech. What you're describing is not a virtue of the first amendment, but rather a shortcoming of its implementation and a subsequent failure to properly regulate corporations/LLCs/etc. OP is right - people's ready embrace of corpo-authoritarianism when it lined up with their social mores set the stage for where we are at now. That comic has always been a low point of Munroe's.

This is a long winded way of ignoring the fact that this is government coercion, something the 1st amendment was designed to prevent. What you're talking about is _not_ something the 1st amendment was designed to prevent.

No, I am most definitely not ignoring or downplaying that.

> What you're talking about is _not_ something the 1st amendment was designed to prevent.

Yes, in fact I explicitly acknowledged it as a "shortcoming of its implementation".

What I'm taking issue with is your whitewashing corporate censorship as "exercising the first amendment" in your first comment.

> What I'm taking issue with is your whitewashing corporate censorship as "exercising the first amendment" in your first comment.

It read more as equivocating completely different things, one of which is much more serious. The fact is "corporate censorship" is not a 1st amendment issue.

Ask yourself who is more legitimized to take such enforcement actions: a handful of privately owned corporations acting in concert or a democratically elected government?

No, the "first amendment only applies to government" is cope of the highest degree, it was always a cope.

You accepted that an oligopoly could dictate what you could do with devices you owned because it suited your preferences and now that you are on the other side of the sword you squirm.

The correct answer was neither all along.