|
|
|
|
|
|
by Misdicorl
2311 days ago
|
|
|
I'm ignoring the legalese to make a distinction between a human and non-human person. Corporations were granted free speech in a couple famous supreme court cases (NYT v. Sullivan, NYT vs. U.S.) and is not tied to the more recent non-human 'person' law. The relevant question in my mind is how to protect Wikipedia and the New York Times and The Red Cross and ... from censorship by the government. There are very many organizations which speak in ways that the government would prefer they wouldn't- not all of them are traditional press, but many are. Your proposal would allow the government to censor them all as they no longer have that protected right. |
|
|
The ISPs aren't acting as a press, unless they wish to assert that their primary objective is to publish IPs and other metadata. That is fine as well but they should then lose protection as a simple carrier of data. They would also incur liability of what is published. I'm fair sure they wouldn't want that. They would scream "we're not a press we're a carrier!" to escape that liability.
This is similar to the postal service asserting that they are a press and then selling delivery details or even opening your letters and sharing their content. So, what business are they in? Publisher or carrier? I think it matters.
[1] The weaker fallback of a corporation using its employee's freedom of speech asserts that those employees are fully protected from the corporation. I doubt that is ever true. So in a real way the employees don't have free rein over their opinions and speech. Restricted speakers. I'd therefore not be relying on that. I'd want wikipedia etc protected under freedom of press instead.