The Illusion of Free Speech

Americans have a solid faith in the expression of "Freedom of Speech" -- but only as long as they agree with what is being expressed. If the speech is unpopular, or in need of condemning by community standards, then the speech is repressed and made costly in the loss of its ranging.

Abridging unpopular speech is always making unpopular news:

NEW YORK (AP) - Rant all you want in a public park. A police officer generally won't eject you for your remarks alone, however unpopular or provocative.

Say it on the Internet, and you'll find that free speech and other constitutional rights are anything but guaranteed.

Companies in charge of seemingly public spaces online wipe out content that's controversial but otherwise legal. Service providers write their own rules for users worldwide and set foreign policy when they cooperate with regimes like China. They serve as prosecutor, judge and jury in handling disputes behind closed doors.

The governmental role that companies play online is taking on greater importance as their services - from online hangouts to virtual repositories of photos and video - become more central to public discourse around the world. It's a fallout of the Internet's market-driven growth, but possible remedies, including government regulation, can be worse than the symptoms.

Political discourse was recently shut down in New York City, but the most ominous rise of oppression in the name of fairness is the want to return to the bad old days of the "Fairness Doctrine" that would knock out talk radio and blogging in a single pen swipe if that doctrine becomes the new law of the land:

There’s a huge concern among conservative talk radio hosts that reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine would all-but destroy the industry due to equal time constraints. But speech limits might not stop at radio. They could even be extended to include the Internet and “government dictating content policy.”

FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell raised that as a possibility after talking with bloggers at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. McDowell spoke about a recent FCC vote to bar Comcast from engaging in certain Internet practices – expanding the federal agency’s oversight of Internet networks.

The commissioner, a 2006 President Bush appointee, told the Business & Media Institute the Fairness Doctrine could be intertwined with the net neutrality battle. The result might end with the government regulating content on the Web, he warned. McDowell, who was against reprimanding Comcast, said the net neutrality effort could win the support of “a few isolated conservatives” who may not fully realize the long-term effects of government regulation.

Free Speech is, and always has been, an illusion.

Free Speech never had blanket protection -- there were always exceptions and conditions placed upon it -- and none of us should be surprised one day when an email comes knocking demanding we publish an opposing position for every blog post we make... and for every thought we publicly express.

When that day happens -- and it will arrive soon -- where every argument has a legally required counter position, even if it is ineffectual and specious, we become lesser in the ridiculousness of the propagation of the illusion that speech was ever free in the first place.