If you want to use state power to control private companies because you don't like the decisions they make, *you* are the greater danger to a free society.

Regulation is a vital element of integrating new technology and corporate power with our free societies, with all the rights and freedoms we have worked so hard for. But it takes time, and is far slower than the impact new tech can have.

I've been writing on this balance between government & business and rights and the public good for years, mostly on my Avast blog. Coming from a totalitarian state, I obviously have a dim view of govt power, which is often abused and never conceded voluntarily.

Govt can regulate in a pro-free market, pro-innovation way, the way Teddy Roosevelt and Taft broke Standard Oil and the trusts. Such efforts must have a place when the public good is clearly at risk.

But today, we mostly see partisan efforts to abuse public power to curtail rights, to threaten and control individuals and companies that have angered one political group or another. If they succeed, it's a vicious cycle.

There are many legitimate debates about Twitter's ban of Trump, for example, and we are lucky to be free to have them. But none of them should include whether they should have the right to do so.

Lastly, if you think what Twitter and other companies did is "censorship," or "like the USSR," you don't know anything about censorship or the USSR. I do, and when the state attacks a company for offending an official is when you're getting closer, not the other way around.