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I agree to an extent, but part of ownership is having the ability to rent it out. Without the incentive to extract rent, there would be no motive to accrue the large amount of infrastructure which has given us such incredibly low costs and high efficiency. This has reduced barriers to entry for the average individual to operate blogs, personal pages, online businesses, and more. I can't think of a better time for free speech. "Real life" is not as different as you think from what's going on right now. There's a reason that you see the exercise of free speech (peaceful, lawful demonstrations) in public spaces: private individuals should be secure in their private property from the intrusions of others into their otherwise private affairs. You can't just violate someone's private property against their will or you'll face legal consequences. Corporations are legally recognized persons (like it or not, established law in US), and are entitled to similar property rights, including the same right that I use to lawfully rent out my residential property when I'd otherwise be taking a loss on it while not living there. Specifically, though, you seem focused on the rent aspect of the property issue, and (if I'm reading your argument correctly) are concerned that large corporations seeking rent are a threat to free speech. It's strange that you contrast "Real Life" to the one in which corporations don't have similar property rights. You're making an unnecessary distinction between "online" and "real life"; ownership rights extend to everything digital, and a corporation has no less a right to own infrastructure (servers, cables, routers, etc.) or software than an individual. And why should they? Individuals can't deliver the scale and efficiency that large corporations regularly do. Corporations such as AWS have brought us into an unprecedented time in which there is no shortage of ways for individuals to exercise their free speech--due entirely to their desire as a corporation to make profit from seeking rent. The endgame of your argument is nationalization. It hinges on some cabal of powerful people doing powerful things to powerless people, which of course we need the government to protect us from. Some well-meaning, but onerous regulations are enacted to appease an irrational fear, and smaller competitors are pushed out while large corporations increase their market share. While you recognize that there is a "huge number of other parties" in the market, you fail to see that you are proposing a self-fulfilling prophecy in that even smaller numbers of "powerful people" will control vast swaths of infrastructure. Of course, it logically follows for the government to protect us again from the "powerful people" when they inevitable suffer the back-end of the business cycle, either by nationalizing the infrastructure outright or seizing ownership of large portions of it through. Or you could consider a bailout of some sort, but we are pretty far from the healthy market conditions that exist if we're discussing bailing out tech companies. While well-meaning, your argument would result in the exact opposite of its stated purpose of protecting free speech. I can't imagine that allowing the US--not exactly considered a bastion of civil liberties by the crowd on here--to nationalize infrastructure would result in a net positive for free speech around the world. |