[iamnothere]

Access to speech has indeed been a problem; there were plenty of court cases about it in the 2000s. What is new, at least in my awareness, is a breakdown in access to infrastructure. Many (though not all) hosts/registrars/etc were built by ideological libertarians who had an absolutist free speech bent. Sites seemed more likely to encounter resistance from the government and big corporations than from their providers. Now the providers are big corporations, and they have close ties with the government!

A prime example is rotten.com. They faced plenty of C&Ds and government lawsuits, but it looks like they weren't forced into self-hosting until 2014 based on some quick research. Rotten was 1000x worse than Infowars, Gab, or even 4chan, but it was a protest site of sorts and an important free speech canary. (It's dead now, obviously.)

Can you give some examples of leftist sites being booted from their hosts in the 2000s? Maybe I'm not aware of them. WSWS, for instance, seems to be hosted by Godaddy currently, and that's about as left as you can get. Wikileaks is an example of an (IMHO) non-partisan site that has faced troubles, but that's because they actively leaked classified intel about ongoing conflicts. Cyptome faced some government pushback in the 2000s for leaking less controversial material, but they were hosted with Network Solutions in 2012, and now with Web.com.

[Faark]

The sad truth is lefties are mostly irrelevant these days, shifting the overton window far to the right. When have you last heard significant people someone talking nationalizing industries?

A few hippies or blue-haired university students are no threat to any ones lives. (Near-)fascists taking over countries is. As usual, people take action not because of some principle, but because a problem got so bad it cannot be ignored anymore. And as usual, it might already be too late...