Why would it? The key difference is businesses / people making choices and the government coercing businesses / people to make choices the government wants. One is a first amendment violation, one is exercising the first amendment.
A company with significant coercive power (through sticky market effects) is much better thought of as a governmentesque censoring entity rather than some mere group of individuals exercising their individual speech. What you're describing is not a virtue of the first amendment, but rather a shortcoming of its implementation and a subsequent failure to properly regulate corporations/LLCs/etc. OP is right - people's ready embrace of corpo-authoritarianism when it lined up with their social mores set the stage for where we are at now. That comic has always been a low point of Munroe's.
Ask yourself who is more legitimized to take such enforcement actions: a handful of privately owned corporations acting in concert or a democratically elected government?
No, the "first amendment only applies to government" is cope of the highest degree, it was always a cope.
You accepted that an oligopoly could dictate what you could do with devices you owned because it suited your preferences and now that you are on the other side of the sword you squirm.
XKCD's point stands as long as nobody has a monopoly on an important medium. Apple and Google effectively do have a duopoly on mobile app distribution, and mobile apps are an important medium for speech in 2025.
From the first part of your comment, it directly follows that neither Apple nor Google has a required monopoly on the important medium.
IMO, we need to stop thinking in this broken paradigm of "-opolies" (with its loaded requirement to define what constitutes a given "market") and look at the actual coercive power they wield through market stickiness. Apple and Google both wield much coercive power with regards to software running on mobile devices.
I am all for letting low effort labor exploiters create low effort comics. Same as I am for my having no obligation to support them directly by reading their comics.
Entertainers are a kind of contemporary secular faith healer and tribal shaman, imo.
To mix metaphors, stopped clocks who can be right and worth listening to only in very specific situations.
myko|4 months ago
mindslight|4 months ago
EdiX|4 months ago
No, the "first amendment only applies to government" is cope of the highest degree, it was always a cope.
You accepted that an oligopoly could dictate what you could do with devices you owned because it suited your preferences and now that you are on the other side of the sword you squirm.
The correct answer was neither all along.
Zak|4 months ago
mindslight|4 months ago
IMO, we need to stop thinking in this broken paradigm of "-opolies" (with its loaded requirement to define what constitutes a given "market") and look at the actual coercive power they wield through market stickiness. Apple and Google both wield much coercive power with regards to software running on mobile devices.
howieburger|4 months ago
Entertainers are a kind of contemporary secular faith healer and tribal shaman, imo.
To mix metaphors, stopped clocks who can be right and worth listening to only in very specific situations.