A Public Affair?

Politics and court precedents always set for me a certain wonder for what will arise as a result of them. I wonder how the founding fathers of America would feel about how the second amendment extends to assault rifles when their goals at the time were simply to make up for the lack of a standing army. In the private rights and free speech debate in such places as malls and Disney, there’s obviously a lot of ambiguity for how laws put in place before electricity was really harnessed end up being interpreted in today’s day and age. Beyond even ideas like Disney policemen giving false impressions or protesting fur in front of Macy’s, I start to consider what implications ‘private domain’ may begin to have with the future of the internet.

The internet is inherently extremely ‘public’. It gives off all of the implications of a something that is public for personal gain (be it marketing or showing off a toy soldier collection) and therefore by the Chickasaw precedent of so many years ago which stated “The more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it.” (326 U.S. 501, 1947: 505, quoted in Lonsway 354)

So when a website gives off all the ‘identity’ signals of something public and is distinguished only by the fact that it is privately owned, can they get mad (as in ‘suing’ mad) when someone posts something insulting to them on their website? What about when someone is in a public forum on privately record company’s website and starts promoting their own show or band? Today, that’s usually called ‘spamming’, and like the ‘flyers in the mall’, one’s immediate reaction might be ‘well no, because that website belongs to that record company’.

But imagine if you will, a world many years from now where nearly everything you ‘need’ can be found with nothing more than the internet. Then, like the mall, that age old argument can be made again that if people are doing everything they need to online and 98% of all musicians start using one website that just starts to hold a sweeping monopoly for them (kind of like Google in the search engine business), then can’t one say that their entire target audience exists on that website and therefore they should be able to advertise to fulfill their ‘free press’, ‘free speech’ rights? Of course this kind of speculative debate could go on for many thousands of words, and is potentially useless until it starts to show itself more as a problem, but there’s some food for thought. Where, in a future internet-dominated world, is it okay to shamelessly advertise for free?

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