[This is an excerpt from my 1995 Yale Law Journal article "Cheap Speech and What It Will Do," written for a symposium called "Emerging Media Technology and the First Amendment.) Thirty years later, I thought I'd serialize the piece here, to see what I may have gotten right—and what I got wrong.]
While American government agencies generally don't regulate speech, private parties do. Publishers sometimes refuse to publish material they disagree with. Private groups sometimes pressure publishers to drop certain material. And even the viewpoint-neutral reluctance of publishers to accept work that appeals to too few consumers has the effect of shutting out political fringe groups on all sides of the spectrum.
The shift of control from publishers to speakers will greatly weaken these private speech regulations. When speech comes straight from the speaker to the listener, there's no one in between to regulate the speech, and no one for various groups to pressure if they think the speech is reprehensible. Threats of boycotts may work against diversified companies that sell information to many markets-someone can tell, say, Time Warner Records "If you carry Ice-T's Cop Killer, I won't buy other Time Warner material." But telling Ice-T "If you keep singing Cop Killer, I won't buy your other material" probably won't work; people who say this probably wouldn't buy his music anyway.
