>Google is a private business and they can do what they want, This kind of an argument shows up every time Google or Facebook or some other megacorp does somet

>Google is a private business and they can do what they want, This kind of an argument shows up every time Google or Facebook or some other megacorp does something detrimental to free speech. It would be a reasonable thing to say if they didn't control millions of conversations every day, show millions of ads to millions of people, and so on. When a company has a budget that would put it in the 20 biggest economies in the world if it were a country, this kind of a statement no longer applies. It doesn't matter that it's privately owned, its very existence impacts the lives of most people in most developed countries in the world, if it infringes on free speech, it should be regulated.