Those are trivial differences that have no relevance to the publicity of the establishment. I suppose I should have asked “In what meaningful way?” But I didn’t think I had to lol.
The court didn’t even extend Marsh to shopping malls (Lloyd v. Tanner), the difference between a private town and private shopping center being sufficient to distinguish how the First Amendment applies.
I’m sure the 1994 NJ supreme court took that 1972 Tanner decision into consideration when they decided 4-3 that “malls must allow access to protesters who want to distribute leaflets on social issues.” nytimes.com/1994/12/21/nyreg … ml?mcubz=1
Declaring that shopping malls have replaced the parks and squares that were “traditionally the home of free speech,”
And now that malls are vacant, social media is next… and in particular, this place.
And that takes us back to Marsh in that: the more an owner opens his property up to the public in general, the more his rights are circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who are invited in.
The Fairness Doctrine applied to broadcast media,
Difference? Aren’t you broadcasting? Publicly?
an industry heavily controlled by the federal government,
Relevance?
which still owns all the airwaves and only licenses their use to private companies.
Who owns the internet? And why does it matter concerning the rights of speech? The audience is public, so ownership is beside the point.
Red Lion expressly relied on the limited availability of broadcast radio spectrum. The reasoning does not apply to the internet, and the Fairness Doctrine likely would not have been upheld in that context.
That’s why it was struck down; because there was ample competition. The problem is obvious, as pointed out by Trump with his Fake News campaign in that ALL the media are biased… CNN, NBC, MSNBC, CBS, CNBC, everyone except maybe Fox to some degree and the internet, which is involved in the same problem because google, twitter, facebook, et al are all just as biased as the mainstream media. So the competition-reasoning doesn’t work since fairness is still absent and, through monopoly, the public is presented with a one-sided view.
It’s trivially easy to make a competing forum if a user doesn’t like the rules here or is banned, as evidenced by the fact that ILP has spun off a half dozen other forums started and frequented by disgruntled or banned members.
I’m not sure if it’s trivially easy or not, since I’ve no clue how, but to arise to the popularity of twitter, youtube, and google isn’t a matter of trivia, even though that doesn’t apply to ILP, per se, but is a deeper resultant of the ethical slippery slope that begins with ILP.
Nor did the court’s ruling say that the government must or even should maintain the Fairness Doctrine, because that isn’t the court’s place. Rather, it held that the Fairness Doctrine was a permitted exception to the First Amendment in the context of broadcast radio.
Well, yeah, the courts aren’t legislators, but only interpreters of legislation. All they can do is work within the existing legislation, which is mutually exclusive from what is right/wrong, ethical/unethical.
What matters is the political nature of the site coupled with the accessibility to the public at large that differentiates it from a pub where you can boot people out for any reason you want because a pub is your own private establishment where the goings-on aren’t plastered all over the internet under the guise of “philosophy” for added credence. Even a mall or a state park is less public than ILP. Even the public library is less public, for crying out loud Even prison inmates can come here, but not go to the library or a park. If any place in the universe is public, ILP is it.