To me, free speech is not just a law, but also an ideal that society should aspire to. When the government was the only entity that could realistically restrict your speech, the old laws were enough. But today there exist new powerful entities that can restrict everyone's speech, harming society about as much as a bona fide government restriction would, and they don't even have to consult the representatives of the public beforehand.
An analogy: if the government were the only employer in the country, then it would make sense to make anti-discrimination laws that only forbid discrimination by the government. Then times would change, private companies would begin to employ people, and something like your argument would be used to defend allowing private companies to discriminate.
If tomorrow Google, Facebook and Twitter announce that they're going to jointly ban any speech criticizing penguins, that will sound like an attack on free speech to me. Even worse if they install automatic filters in their chat clients, to block you if you badmouth penguins while talking to your friend privately. Even worse if cellphone companies join suit and begin filtering text messages. Even though all of these are private companies that are 100% within their rights.
Rigorous enforcement of property rights to the exclusion of all else just isn't enough to make society pleasant to live in. They need to be balanced out with right-of-way laws, fair-use laws, antitrust laws, all sorts of regulations to ensure that the big guy doesn't use his power to make the little guy worse off.
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To me, free speech is not just a law, but also an ideal that society should aspire to. When the government was the only entity that could realistically restrict your speech, the old laws were enough. But today there exist new powerful entities that can restrict everyone's speech, harming society about as much as a bona fide government restriction would, and they don't even have to consult the representatives of the public beforehand.
An analogy: if the government were the only employer in the country, then it would make sense to make anti-discrimination laws that only forbid discrimination by the government. Then times would change, private companies would begin to employ people, and something like your argument would be used to defend allowing private companies to discriminate.
If tomorrow Google, Facebook and Twitter announce that they're going to jointly ban any speech criticizing penguins, that will sound like an attack on free speech to me. Even worse if they install automatic filters in their chat clients, to block you if you badmouth penguins while talking to your friend privately. Even worse if cellphone companies join suit and begin filtering text messages. Even though all of these are private companies that are 100% within their rights.
Rigorous enforcement of property rights to the exclusion of all else just isn't enough to make society pleasant to live in. They need to be balanced out with right-of-way laws, fair-use laws, antitrust laws, all sorts of regulations to ensure that the big guy doesn't use his power to make the little guy worse off.