All analogies are strained to the digital world. HN is not a 'printing press': it's not the mechanism of reproduction. Maybe the server is. Maybe the ARC code.

All analogies are strained to the digital world. HN is not a 'printing press': it's not the mechanism of reproduction. Maybe the server is. Maybe the ARC code. But also the wires. HN is the editorial process. But I suggest that friends of free speech, and against government censorship, should adopt an expansive definition of 'speech' and 'press': everything that's part of the communication creation-delivery process. Quibbling about definitions and analogies with regard to fundamental rights helps those who want to grow and abuse their power. The FCC does censor. It enforces wiretap requirements. It has, through licensing and ownership rules, created market concentration in other media industries, and preferentially rewarded politically-connected entities. Its board members and staffers are the same kind of congressional-staff/lobbyist/political-partisan lawyers who draft things like SOPA/PIPA for big donors. Yes, I know there are federal shipping regulations too: and they're also unnecessary and abusive, benefiting large incumbents no matter their initial supposed pro-competition rationales. They are another example of how neutrality regulation will, no matter its initial form, be perverted over time by the political process. Let Time-Warner or Verizon try such blatantly discriminatory policies. They will be ridiculed, consumers will choose other providers, a blossoming of circumvention technologies will arise. Bits are bits, the Internet works, and it doesn't need an overbearing big brother at the FCC to protect it from such trifling (and still almost entirely hypothetical) provider-meddling.