Or, for that matter, newspapers. Sure, you could make exceptions for the press, but then you have to define it; in general this is very dangerous stuff.
There's a separate argument to be made about whether political speech should be free (mostly unregulated) for corporations... Japan as I understand it is a fairly good example of heavily regulated political speech. As far as I can tell, politics in the modern world is dysfunctional regardless of how light the restrictions on political speech and political organizations' funding and activities. Political speech has many of the same problematic aspects of commercial advertisements, so I think there's room for argument that Citizens United and other precedent on the issue are a disaster, regardless of how much it might help political organizations we like.
Corporations are people - this means that a corporation (rather than some of it's individual members) can own property and owe you money. If you want to sue or enforce obligations, you do it against the corporation itself rather than tracking down specific members and enforcing against them. That's all it means. If you eliminate this and then Comcast injures you, who do you sue?
Freedom of speech is held by the owners of a corporation and it's employees; the corporation is property used by the owners to engage in speech. Saying corporations don't have freedom of speech is like saying inanimate objects such as printing presses don't have freedom of the press. Note that printing presses do NOT have personhood, yet they still have freedom of the press.
Corporations have 'free speech' in the sense that a corporation can spend its money without legal limit on political campaigns. The number of people who have effective control over that money is quite small in relation to the number of owners. Saying a corporation has free speech is not all like saying a printing press has free speech. Corporations have their own bank accounts, their own money, are subject to laws and have legal privileges that printing presses do not.
Suppose we eliminated corporate personhood. Now a collective of people are bound together in a web of contracts and call themselves "citizens united". They agree to act and use a subset of their property in accordance with a specific governance structure determined by a mutually agreed upon charter. How do you hinder this non-corporate group's rights to free speech?
I think you have a reasonable point to make, but you are not being clear enough.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The court has ruled that this also means that humans can use their property in the furtherance of speech. Such property can be a printing press, a computer connected to the internet, a corporation, a ship, a billboard or other such things.
Some of those pieces of property are legal persons (corporations, ships), others are not. The personhood of the piece of property is irrelevant.
This is very strange to me. You sue Comcast, the corporation, of course. There's nothing inherent to the label "people" that allows people to own property or have accounts, nor anything inherent to the label "corporations" the prevents corporations from owning property and having accounts. We could call them "non-person property-holders" or "obbgobblegooks" for all I care, and decide on whatever rules we want.
Isn't it generally quite clear when an owner is purchasing something personal with their own money as opposed to when an owner is authorizing a purchase of something for their corporation with the corporation's money? In theory, what's to prevent us from declaring that corporations are not people, are allowed to have money, property, goods, and debt and are not allowed to spend their money on, among other things, advertising?
This isn't to say that doing so prevents any sort of non-individual spending on advertising. But saying that "corporations have to be people" and "we can't impose any additional control over corporation spending because actually the owners do the spending" seems irrelevant and incorrect.
Yes, we could redefine the term "personhood" to (in the legal context) refer to something else, and then use the word "obbgobblegooks" to refer to the concept that personhood currently refers to.
In theory, what's to prevent us from declaring that corporations are not people, are allowed to have money, property, goods, and debt and are not allowed to spend their money on, among other things, advertising?
The same thing that prevents us from declaring that the constitution doesn't apply to printing presses; the free speech rights of their owners.
If you want to argue against Citizens United, and say that the government should be allowed to apply prior restraints to free speech that uses property, go ahead and do that. But none of this has anything to do with corporate personhood.
Similarly, your right to name your ship "SS Ilovebush" has nothing to do with ship personhood - that's just your free speech right as a guy with a ship and a paintbrush.
But that's just pedantry. The real issue is that your solution is far too broad and is likely to have unintended side effects. We already have laws curtailing speech of both people and corporations. Free speech is not absolute in the US. We already have "misleading advertising" laws that have been used successfully against corporations.
You can solve this problem if you want by just expanding the scope of existing laws. You don't need to abolish corporate personhood to achieve it.
That would be one of the country's easiest laws to work around. It wouldn't be effective.