Your generalization is false -- utilities such as electricity are regulated by the government and provide a life-critical service. No one has suggested that we should shut off the heat for alleged bigots in the middle of winter.
I can't take seriously the idea that corporations have any human rights at all. Corporations are distinctly non-human, so the idea that CloudFlare has "freedom of association" seems nonsensical. If I run a newspaper and print bold-faced lies, that's (rarely) illegal, but if you run false advertising that's not permitted.
I think this is a very large and unstated assumption. If you stick with it, where do you end up?
For example, landlords are private corporations and not utilities. Should they be free to kick out alleged bigots, too? Should their banks? If all the private corporations band together to decide to deny you service, rendering you homeless, unemployed, etc., in what meaningful sense do you enjoy free speech?
Whatever worldview you're arguing for here is not the world in which we find ourselves in today.
Again, you're exaggerating to ridiculous extremes. No one has argued that bigots should be made homeless. Everyone, bigot or otherwise, has the right to basic human necessities, including food, shelter, healthcare, and so on, though I must acknowledge that most western governments are failing to provide these for their people. You do not, however, have a right to a particular job, or to hosting for your website, and so on.
Businesses are not people, but they are made of people, and their freedoms do not go away when they clock in to their job. Certain industries are regulated, and those freedoms limited by this regulation, such as banks, to serve the interest of the public. But again, the essential freedoms are present by default, and important.
My specific argument is that large, monopoly providers (e.g. CloudFlare) should be regulated industries, because to do otherwise would undermine the authority of the government.
> Whatever worldview you're arguing for here is not the world in which we find ourselves in today.
This is more common than you'd think. In Italy, there was a case where a (registered, legal) quasi-fascist party sued Facebook for being banned - and won. Facebook got a court order to reinstate their access. The reason for this was simply that the Italians had decided that they should be allowed to have a platform, and so Facebook wasn't in a position to say otherwise.
> I must acknowledge that most western governments are failing to provide these for their people.
Agreed.
> No one has argued that bigots should be made homeless.
I'm not sure. The common line of reasoning that I hear goes something like this: "While the government can't shut them down (owing to legal technicalities), they still should be, and so anything that is done to them is ipso facto morally justified.". Grant that this may be a strawman, but it doesn't seem far off from the paradox of tolerance, under which depriving them of things more precious than their homes would seem justified.
> Everyone, bigot or otherwise, has the right to basic human necessities, including food, shelter, healthcare, and so on. You do not, however, have a right to a particular job, or to hosting for your website, and so on.
Where does the limit go?
Firstly, if private corporations can deny people the (de-facto) ability to spread their views, why couldn't they also deny them of their (de-facto) ability to, say, eat? The basic issue at play doesn't seem to be that speech rights are ontologically different from other rights, just that private corporations are not bound by these rights.
On the contrary, denying them of both would obviously be more efficient at preventing "bad" speech - if people had their bank accounts closed as soon as their phone heard them saying a racial slur, this would trivially result in people saying less racial slurs.
Secondly, if people are deprived of all their abilities to, say, host websites, then by what metric do they still enjoy free speech? If I'm running a newspaper, and all the printing presses decide to stop doing business with me, then how am I to get anything published? Doesn't this have the direct and obvious result of moving power over from the (democratic) government to corporations?
> Businesses are not people, but they are made of people, and their freedoms do not go away when they clock in to their job.
This is a very interesting point. But what do you mean by people?
Do you mean the employees? That's fair, but, though I hate to belabor the point, it's not really the employees on the ground making this kind of decision. Maybe we should have more workplace democracy, but the way it empirically works in practice is that the guys at the top tells them what they have to do, and then they do it.
But if you mean the owners, then I will have to most vehemently disagree. "Property rights should be unlimited" is not a natural corollary of freedom of association, and a tiny clique of property-owners deciding who gets to speak is not a desirable social result.
Landlords can do this in the US almost anywhere.
