Orwell has this great line, “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations."
So the promise of the early internet was to allow anyone to publish without permission.
This was a particular goal of the cypherpunk movement that Assange came out of.
WikiLeaks is an extreme example of "printing what someone else does not want printed", worth watching as a canary for press freedom.
I also see it as an unsolved technology issue. Our infrastructure for censorship resistant publishing, eg for whistleblowers, shouldn't be a plain old website, run by a few people like Assange taking unreasonable personal risks.
