> The extent to which corporations should be considered private entities does not seem like a settled question to me. Your corporation has no natural right to exist, and therefore does not have the natural right to do business solely as it pleases.
This is a particularly interesting topic - a lot of the parallels around private vs. public places seem to have eroded over time. Facebook, Twitter and others are now serving the function of a public place. They are means of communication used by governments and elected leaders.
I suspect at some point soon there will be a shift in the balance here, to try and address the extent to which companies are "private entities" sitting outside of the legal frameworks, where they deal with the public. NJ views privately owned shopping malls to be public places from a 1st amendment perspective, even though it is not publicly owned - it isn't a huge leap to consider FB or similar as a public space on that basis.
This is a particularly interesting topic - a lot of the parallels around private vs. public places seem to have eroded over time. Facebook, Twitter and others are now serving the function of a public place. They are means of communication used by governments and elected leaders.
I suspect at some point soon there will be a shift in the balance here, to try and address the extent to which companies are "private entities" sitting outside of the legal frameworks, where they deal with the public. NJ views privately owned shopping malls to be public places from a 1st amendment perspective, even though it is not publicly owned - it isn't a huge leap to consider FB or similar as a public space on that basis.