The web is becoming professionalised: if you want to publish user-generated content on the web, you will need to moderate all of that content. The Internet is going the same way as radio: for most people, you'll be tuning in to regulated, commercial services. For enthusiasts, there will be a separate space where you can do whatever you want, but you can't offer laissez-faire services on behalf of the great unwashed. It's a great loss of theoretical freedom, but it'll have no impact on anyone's real life.
Given that the internet has almost completely supplanted the public square, I wouldn't say that putting it all under corporate control ("regulated, commercial services") would have no impact on real life.
The public square has always been controlled by private interests. Before the internet, public discourse occurred in newspapers and magazines. Coffeehouses and pubs were always privately-owned, and their proprietors and clientele-at-large determine what conduct and conversation is acceptable within.
Free speech absolutism isn't a real thing, you know: everyone has a set of ideas that they're not willing to listen to.
Coffeehouses and pubs weren't remotely as consolidated as social or traditional media, nor did they have as much power to regulate the speech of its patrons - not everything the patrons said was overheard or written down by the owner.
The nature of public discourse contained in newspapers and magazines hasn't changed. What has changed is that more and more of person-to-person communication is mediated.
> everyone has a set of ideas that they're not willing to listen to.
Yes. But are they choosing what they will listen to, or are they forced by law to have that choice made for them by a government-approved corporation?
