Last week I was at Tempe Marketplace; a large sprawling new mall that contains indoor and outdoor public spaces. It has plenty of outdoor furniture and the misted water which is popular in Phoenix that helps keep the body's heat down.

Americans have a sophisticated view of freedom of speech and other political rights. Courtesy of these political rights being entrenched in the US Constitution as amendments the civil understanding of them and the political reproach of them is quite detailed.

These are political rights though, not property rights and are areas of liberty that the government cannot intrude into. So public spaces related to government control, such as a park, tend not to extinguish freedom of political speech. The other aspect is that the censoring of political views is often democratically impossible in a country that is used to the liberal nature of free speech. It can be done, and often is in secret ways, but for the most part it is hard to remove.

Anick Jesdanun has an article which argues that these rights are not only political, but inalienable to the individual and necessary for a healthy and functioning civic society. He argues that companies are making the political arguments impoverished by over-cautious removal of political and social speech.

From the article:

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.

One of the complaints is that the policing of these guidelines can be arbitrary and frustrating. Governments and other bodies, rather than going after an individual, will go after a company such as youtube with a blanket complaint and have them remove a user. Consequently the idea of speech rights get squeezed between the competing interests of consumerism, government demands, company demands, special interest groups and so forth and so forth. Not to mention legislation.

I am not seeing there being any great extinguishment of political speech by the internet. People can, and do, create their own sites outside of the wider guidelines of internet behemoths like yahoo, flickr, google, myspace, youtube, etc etc. Nothing is really stopping an individual doing that and being sovereign over their own view of what a public space is.
More reading: Tags, Public Space, Internet
Cam Riley: South Sea Republic. Freedom, liberty, equity and an Australian Republic.