Censorship in a Democracy?

Part of the foundation of America's democracy is the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press. Since the beginning when our founding fathers wrote up the constitution, censorship of the press was forbidden. This being the case, why is it that government and big corporations today think that it is okay to begin to censor the media and individuals just because they either don't like what they have to say or don't like what they are exposing about said government.

Although our founding fathers could have never imagined the emergence of the Internet, the idea of free speech still applies. People have a right to their opinion, especially in a democracy, and to try to censor that opinion just because others don't agree goes against everything this country was built on.

The fact that a large corporation like Verizon has the power to block messages from NARAL, a subscription service most likely because NARAL's views are not in line with Verizon's. This was therefore violating their right to free speech. Verizon's defense to this was that they blocked it because "phone companies do a service for subscribers by blocking a lot of text-message "spam" - unwanted commercial come-ons that drive e-mail users crazy." Clearly this is a bogus excuse. These people had to SUBSCRIBE to this service, meaning that they wanted these messages given to them. Verizon ended up unblocking these messages, but the fact that the had the power in the first place to do so is worrisome.

This doesn't only happen with large corporations, but there have been cases where our judicial system has ruled against the right to free speech.

In 2008 a federal judge in San Fransisco ordered the WikiLeaks site to be disabled. This was due to the leaking of information about a bank in the Cayman Islands, a known spot to hide money that you don't want found. This is exactly what WikiLeaks exposed of Julius Baer Bank. Although the judge ordered that the domain name WikiLeaks.org be disabled, the loop hole was that many other domain names had been created with the same content.

Not only did he order them to shut down their site, but to stop distributing the documents about the bank corruption.

David Ardia, the director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard Law School, even pointed out that the judges ruling "is clearly not constitutional."

Aren't they the ones that are supposed to hold up and make sure everyone abides by the laws of the constitution?

Although the ruling was eventually overturned, it goes to show just how much power our government has. It also shows the threat against first amendment rights and against independent journalism. If this continues, and one time the ruling sticks, journalism will never be the same.  

This just goes to show just how important net-neutrality is. If net neutrality goes away, will our democracy truly even be a democracy anymore? Independent media outlets will have a difficult time surviving, and our country will never be the same. Hopefully that doesn't happen.