There is a legitimate argument that freedom of speech is simply not possible in a corporate media system. Freedom of the press belongs to anyone who owns one (a printing press) and all that. The Internet promised to change all of that. After all, on the Net, even an obscure blogger can theoretically access as many readers as the Wall Street Journal. On the other hand, if I try to publish a magazine or newspaper or run my own radio or TV station, I am going to run into a lot of problems. In fact, it would be impossible for me to do any of these things.
So the Internet was the great leveler and potentially the greatest force for the democratization of media in many decades. It was similar to the early days of the newspaper in the US with the proliferation of often citizen-published broadsheets, mostly on the East Coast ~200 years ago. Any man could be a publisher, and often was.
The corporate scum are very worried about this state of affairs, in which a Leftist like Robert Lindsay could theoretically garner a large audience and break the corporate monopoly on the media, hence the battle over Network Neutrality, in which the corporations want to put little guys like me in the Internet “slow lane” unless I fork over a ton of money to corporate Net tool booths. In addition, our corporate feudal masters reserve the right to completely ban connections to sites like Robert Lindsay on the grounds that they don’t like what I am saying.
In other words, corporate America is downright anti-democratic. They wish to control 10
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