To a certain degree you are right about spam and malware, but I think those are quite in a different category, as it's pretty clear cut which is which. Spam is

To a certain degree you are right about spam and malware, but I think those are quite in a different category, as it's pretty clear cut which is which. Spam is random email from people who seem to send a lot of those types of emails to many people, and malware is code that uses known vulnerabilities in the CVE database, so again, pretty clear-cut which stuff they are supposed to stop. Censoring speech is in a way different league. So I think things started going downhill when they started being very aggressive about copyright. That's certainly been the case with Google. They fought on our side against SOPA, because they figured abiding by SOPA would cost them too much manual work. But then they wanted TV content and music services on the Play Store and Youtube, so stuff like SOPA became more acceptable to them as they were trying to get those deals. So they implemented highly-aggressive and anti-fair use takedown bots across the Google search engine and Youtube to appease those companies with which they were making deals as much as possible. So now of course the governments are like: "Well, if you can identify copyrighted content, surely you can identify "extremist" content, too, right?"