> That's just as silly as if someone had said, "Certain people losing their 1st Amendment rights is simply the natural consequence of the operation of the marketplace of ideas."
Only if you equate exercise of first amendment rights with loss of first amendment rights. Choosing to relay content or not is a first amendment right, compelling other people to do so on your behalf is not.
While there might be a legitimate debate that some positive rights exist, the rights enshrined in the first amendment are negative, not positive.
> There is a lawsuit where a company owned this mining company town, including all of its roads and sidewalks. A Jehova's witness won a lawsuit on the basis of the First Amendment, enabling her to walk about that town and distribute her pamphlets.
But no one entity is positioned the way Gulf Shipbuilding was in Marsh v. Alabama, so as to exercise the power to control the expressive rights of an entire community. Were there a single internet monopoly that did this at any level of the stack, perhaps the situation would be comparable (the fact that broadband ISPs are often local monopolies or in very narrow oligopoly and can essentially gatekeep all internet usage is, in fact, the basis of a common first amendment argument for net neutrality), but this is not the case, which is why Cyber Promotions v. America Online decided that spam filters did not violate the First Amendment.
Only if you equate exercise of first amendment rights with loss of first amendment rights. Choosing to relay content or not is a first amendment right, compelling other people to do so on your behalf is not.
The "not relaying" gambit is irrelevant and dishonest in 2018. It's as irrelevant as farmers claiming they had the right to charge tolls to airplanes overflying their land, because originally, land deeds extended upwards indefinitely. YouTube "not relaying" is indeed a lot like a company town not wanting someone to walk their streets.
But no one entity is positioned the way Gulf Shipbuilding was in Marsh v. Alabama, so as to exercise the power to control the expressive rights of an entire community
In 2018, this is also dishonest. There are plenty of things which call themselves "communities" which indeed have the substrate of the lion's share of their discourse controlled by one entity.
Only if you equate exercise of first amendment rights with loss of first amendment rights. Choosing to relay content or not is a first amendment right, compelling other people to do so on your behalf is not.
While there might be a legitimate debate that some positive rights exist, the rights enshrined in the first amendment are negative, not positive.
> There is a lawsuit where a company owned this mining company town, including all of its roads and sidewalks. A Jehova's witness won a lawsuit on the basis of the First Amendment, enabling her to walk about that town and distribute her pamphlets.
But no one entity is positioned the way Gulf Shipbuilding was in Marsh v. Alabama, so as to exercise the power to control the expressive rights of an entire community. Were there a single internet monopoly that did this at any level of the stack, perhaps the situation would be comparable (the fact that broadband ISPs are often local monopolies or in very narrow oligopoly and can essentially gatekeep all internet usage is, in fact, the basis of a common first amendment argument for net neutrality), but this is not the case, which is why Cyber Promotions v. America Online decided that spam filters did not violate the First Amendment.