MICHAEL BARONE TAKES ON Law professors for ‘speech control.’

“In the great debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong.” So write Jack Goldsmith and Andrew Keane Woods, law professors at Harvard and the University of Arizona, in the Atlantic.

And they seem to mind, as their next sentence indicates. “Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values.”

So much for the First Amendment. Hey, as Vox’s Ezra Klein might say, that was written in the 18th century, and it’s the 21st century now. So private firms such as Google and Facebook are censoring the internet, in line with government policy, elite preferences, or international organizations. YouTube now pulls and refuses to permit videos based on recommendations by the World Health Organization, the organization which, early on, parroted the implausible suggestion by China’s regime that there was no human-to-human coronavirus infection.

For those who find this alarming, they should remember that this is not the first time in history that a new communications medium threatened existing orders and thus became subject to what Goldsmith and Woods approvingly call “speech control.”

You should still be alarmed.