The "Internet" is, fundamentally, authoritarian but appears unfiltered and inclusive on the surface. I don't say that with any malice. Your Internet service provider, for example, wants your money so long as you aren't a hot potatoe.
What I mean by authoritarian is how the "Internet", a rather loaded term, can be heavy handed in squelching participation that inhibits its normal operation or societal rules. A remarkable example of this is the infamous Dark Net, and a more poignant example is China (which I'll come back to). Hosting providers are "blind" enablers of a myriad of online activities, including those considered amoral ... Avenue Q's character Trekkie Monster humors us into realizing this ..., but sometimes ISPs can't be bothered to enforce societal rules until a participant gets themselves caught or disturbs normal operations. Once they've got a hot potato on their hands, any Internet provider is going to pass on the buck. This explains all the liability crap that we sign off on when buying an Internet service. I don't mean to imply you or I or anyone is doing anything illegal with the Dark Net example, but I'm saying something as benign as free speech is actually a societal characteristic of the US. It's up to participants of the Internet to follow societal rules lest an authoritarian machine works against us.
The Internet has not created, despite popular belief, any (direct) relief to societal problems and is, at least technologically speaking, highly conformist. Those technologies that form the Internet, so to say, are a myriad of protocols and standards created (or "authorized for use") by various quasi-government committees (IETF, IANA, ICANN, W3C, ISO, etc.) and those committee members seek conformity, whether for good or bad. Even technologists use telling terms that allude to the Internet's style of governance, like "Certificate Authority" and "authoritative name server" (despite preying on people's idealizations with mumbo jumbo like "Web of trust"). That conformist characteristic is a fundamental misunderstanding overlooked by Internet free speech and civil rights advocates. Any variance from standardized or expected means of communication and connectivity is both technologically prohibited and authoritatively regulated via the Internet. As long as Internet participants do not undermine the operation of those technologies (i.e. writing a deluge of spam or flooding a website with noise) then you're OK, otherwise folks are labelled a hot potato, aka. hacker, get their connection blocked, and maybe their "private" information sent off to law enforcement.
Mainland China stands out as a poignant example of what I mean. It's not like the "Chinese" Internet is different than our own. It's the same technologies (HTML, HTTP, TCP, IP, OSPF, etc.) applied in an overtly authoritarian way to enforce a different set of societal rules than in the US. If we were Chinese, those Internet technologies would enable you to create an inflammatory website with Mandarin characters, encoded in a standard format (UTF-8), but your local Communist mayor would shut down your site and block your access to facebook.com. That's a characteristic that is in opposition to the folksy (mis)perception, especially in Western countries, of the Internet being inclusive and unfiltered. And, of course, there's always the NSA in the U.S.A.
In some ways the Internet reminds me of the Matrix: when there's a bad apple, like Neo was, it just throws the apple away. That ability to squelch free speech and infringe civil rights (if those exist in a society) are merely authoritarian actions enabled by the Machine that is the "Internet". Thankfully, the above mentioned quasi-government committees that affect Internet technologies have usually taken a hands-off approach to societal issues, so we have a ton of free speech happening on top of Internet service provided in the US. Town hall debates still happen but now they are flame wars in forums -- hopefully encoded in UTF-8 but probably in ISO-8859-1 since we're in the West and largely forget the rest of the world :)
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