I expect that this trend of deputizing companies to police speech on their platforms will evolve in tension with rising antitrust scrutiny of the tech giants, b

I expect that this trend of deputizing companies to police speech on their platforms will evolve in tension with rising antitrust scrutiny of the tech giants, because the rise of utterly dominant companies (a trend that the EU seems intent on slowing) would make efforts to regulate speech easier. Large companies like Google have a global presence, and assets that can be targeted within the jurisdiction of most major governments, while a fragmented - and more competitive - market would make it more likely that "holdouts" can rise beyond the reach of a given government. These platforms would provide a redoubt for regulated speech, because it would be much harder to compel them to pay fines (though of course a country can simply block them). At the same time, these new regulations give a competitive advantage to the companies with the scale and resources to invest in automating the removal process, and increases the challenges for upstart platforms, which now need to develop the infrastructure to aggressively police content on their networks if they want to grow beyond a certain size. I think that in the long run, this will evolve into a stable equilibrium where governments periodically levy large-but-not-devastating fines in the name of "antitrust" in order to show their dedication to "competitive markets" and "customer choice", while simultaneously working hand-in-glove with these companies to enforce what they consider to be acceptable standards of speech in online communities. In the long run, no major competitors will emerge, and both the established firms and the government will silently thank their lucky stars.