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There’s a lot wrong with this piece, but this bit jumps out. Freedom of “the press” (publishing) is explicitly Constitutionally protected to make clear that expression was no less protected when aimed at a mass audience, at a time when much of Europe specially regulated printing. 
As April acknowledges in the next graf, the restrictions on literal broadcasting were heavily contingent on the use of a scarce, publicly administered resource (radio spectrum). Absent that, the “broadcast”
analogy is misleading. YouTube is just a very big publisher.
analogy is misleading. YouTube is just a very big publisher.
It’s frankly a bit weird that she acknowledges this, then just sort of drops it. But to underscore why it’s a problem, try a thought experiment. Imagine instead of having a popular YouTube channel, Crowder or whomever just hosted the videos on their own site.
Suppose those videos are getting millions of views from people watching or downloading them directly from that site. Does a “fairness doctrine” approach mean the Crowder site has to cap its audience? Start hosting Chapo Trap House?
If you remove YouTube as the intermediary, it’s a lot more obvious that any such regulation would just amount to censorship of a speaker/publisher (or compelled speech). But once you recognize that, it’s hard to explain why adding a layer of intermediation changes the analysis.
Incidentally, I think it’s worth bearing in mind that the centrality of platforms as content intermediaries is a contingent and quite possibly temporary state of affairs. Lots of more decentralized models are conceivable, and maybe more attractive as tech evolves.
Remember RSS readers? There’s no real reason in principle that the “platforms hosting content on centralized servers” model has to be how we get news & watch videos for all eternity. Or even a decade from now.
Some of the reason we rely on a centralized model is just a horsepower issue. I could stream videos publicly from the Mac on my desk, but a consumer desktop & broadband connection would choke if they had to handle hundreds or thousands of simultaneous streams. For now.
That’s not the main issue, of course; a lot of the value of centralization is about discovery. But the discovery and hosting functions can in principle be unbundled, in the same way social media has separated out the curation function we used to rely on publications for.
In Ye Olden Tymes, you’d subscribe to the Post & the Atlantic or whatever, and they’d consolidate a lot of different functions. Identify talented writers, commission articles & art, edit, assemble a unified package, print it, deliver it to your door/newsstand.
Now maybe you don’t really need the publication itself for all of those functions. Maybe what validates an article’s quality for you isn’t the publication’s imprimatur, but the author, or shares from friends, or an intermediary recommendation algorithm.
Traditional outlets bundled content production, quality/relevance validation, and distribution. YouTube just bundles validation and distribution. In each case, what functions it makes sense to bundle is a function of technology & economics.
Newspapers are struggling now because their model depended for a long time on bundling news production with a lot of other functions it made sense to consolidate given the economics of delivering big stacks of paper to readers on a daily basis.
At the moment it makes economic sense to bundle hosting and validation/recommendation for video. But that’s as contingent as the bundling of sports scores & real estate listings. I wouldn’t bet on it working that way in, say, 2030.
