IMHO the central question is: do you tolerate zones moderated (or not moderated at all) by their owners exactly how they want it, provided that you remain free to avoid any zone and also to create your own zone(s)?
No one likes spam, abusive content, fake news... However many won't qualify a given content the same way.
IMO, for example, history shows that anyone thinking that he is _right_ and has to educate others by coercing them to pay lip service to his ideas and also by censoring contradiction, walks on a path leading to violent and abusive acts.
> IMHO the central question is: do you tolerate zones moderated (or not moderated at all) by their owners exactly how they want it, provided that you remain free to avoid any zone and also to create your own zone(s)?
Is that not what we do currently? (subject to certain legal restrictions, but generally in usa the restrictions other than copyright are pretty light. And if they aren't, well Tor). You have pretty wide discretion if you self-host, especially on bare metal. Not perfect mind you, but pretty wide.
That's about where I would draw the line. Domain registration needs to be regulated or run by the gov't so that it can be protected by the first amendment. Pretty much everything else can be solved by enforcing antitrust laws so as to prevent one entity controlling too much of the space.
The other challenge is DDoS protection. Any controversial site is going to attract large DDoS attacks; if the big DDoS mitigation providers drop a sites that site is either effectively dead, or pushed into the arms of a sketchy "semi state sponsored" mitigation provider like DDoS-Guard.
Yes, indeed, by and large (in 'Occidental' nations). However during those last ~25 years there are IMO more and more pushes towards censorship, from memory laws ( from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_laws ) to deplatforming ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deplatforming ). Albeit none of those is really new it seems to me that they are gaining speed.
No one likes spam, abusive content, fake news... However many won't qualify a given content the same way.
IMO, for example, history shows that anyone thinking that he is _right_ and has to educate others by coercing them to pay lip service to his ideas and also by censoring contradiction, walks on a path leading to violent and abusive acts.