There are already cases and examples where Cloudflare and other CDNs have kicked sites off of their platform or responded to take down requests.
All it takes is enough money and/or political power.
The thing is this isn't new. Traditional publishing had throttles at the publisher, the seller and the library. Freedom of speech is not requirement to broadcast.
This is what happens when your system is not dumb pipes and can be massaged based on who is currently doing the bossing part.
And this is why I roll my eyes at anyone who tells me 'just do it yourself'. Do what at this point? Roll foundational infrastructure that should be dumb pipes?
Coffee did not kick in yet, but the game is rigged and whatever ideals existed with the emergence of early internet have been gone for a long time now. We are just seeing some of its more visible effects.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/signatures-seized-assets-sold...
> FDIC had told potential bidders that "any buyer of Signature must agree to give up all the crypto business at the bank."
And one of the members of Signature Banks board also claimed the FDIC shut them down without the bank being insolvent. See: https://www.wsj.com/articles/signature-bank-new-york-communi...
You can bet banks will be avoiding crypto.
The USSR's constitution specified that not only was there freedom of speech but also freedom/right to "broadcast".
The state would give anyone access to a printing press to disseminate speech.
In practice it was a bit different though.
The American said "I am so free I can walk up to the gates of the white house and scream 'down with Reagan, he stinks'".
"I have that freedom too" responds the Soviet man, "I could walk over to the Kremlin right now and yell 'Down with Reagan he stinks'"
AFAIK there's no way to say anything on the internet without permission from at least an ISP and DNS... and usually also a webhost and website you don't own. It would be nice to have some legal protections from at least some of those entities.
The state outsources everything, including censorship.
Then it can just say it's out of its hands.
With internet traffic consolidating to just a few major CDNs, the internet is getting more centralized
When did everyone decide they needed Cloudflare for everything? Or is this like how you need to use React and SSR even when you have a relatively simple static site, i.e. cargo cutting?
When distributed denial-of-service attacks through botnets, sold as a service to anyone by the "owners" of these botnets, became popular. It takes just one person who doesn't like you, or even who wants to take your site down "for the lulz", to cause so much traffic that your site is disabled and removed by your hosting provider as a way to "protect" their other clients. By being widely spread over the global Internet, CDNs like cloudflare have the advantage that each node receives only a small portion of a widely distributed denial-of-service attack, instead of receiving all of it at a single place as would happen without a CDN.
I think it was when Reddit and other social link platforms were becoming established, the linked sites would go viral and then the traffic would do an unintended DDOS.
Cloudflare and other providers offered free DDOS protection, then it became a defacto standard to have a CDN
So even though you aren't required to associate any more liberally than you desire--and requiring you to do so would be wrong--it's still true that we need most people to be quite liberal in their associations for this (or any) country to work.
That's all a long way of saying that it's valid to complain about private censorship. It's (generally) not okay to propose that we send in the troops to stop private censorship, but it's fine and good to complain when it happens. It's no different from arguing that some{body|entity} should be nicer, or more careful, or even stricter, for that matter.
My pet peeve however is, "They shouldn't do that" very often leads to, "We shouldn't let them do that." though, which I think we agree is a huge problem.
I call you a name, have I prevented you from expressing your rights? I wouldn't think so.