Entrusting our speech to multiple different corporate actors is always risky. Yet given how most of the internet is currently structured, our online expression largely depends on a set of private companies ranging from our direct Internet service providers and platforms, to upstream ISPs (sometimes...
To do that, you have to know who the perpetrators are, which is routinely impossible.
This isn’t a hypothetical situation, we are living in a world where servers are kicked off the internet, SSL certificates are revoked, vast quantities of emails are deleted without even sending them to a spam folder, lemmy instances are defederated and deleted for posting illegal content, etc.
In a perfect world, none of that would be necessary and we could simply send the perpetrators to jail. But we don’t live in a perfect world. We live in one where censorship is the only option.