Everytime I see someone referencing "free speech" in a way that makes it painfully obvious they skipped over the words "CONGRESS shall make no laws restricting..." I want to bang my head against a wall.
Google is a company, a company that's providing you a service free of charge. They are 100% within their right to tell you how not to use their product.
To me, free speech is not just a law, but also an ideal that society should aspire to. When the government was the only entity that could realistically restrict your speech, the old laws were enough. But today there exist new powerful entities that can restrict everyone's speech, harming society about as much as a bona fide government restriction would, and they don't even have to consult the representatives of the public beforehand.
An analogy: if the government were the only employer in the country, then it would make sense to make anti-discrimination laws that only forbid discrimination by the government. Then times would change, private companies would begin to employ people, and something like your argument would be used to defend allowing private companies to discriminate.
If tomorrow Google, Facebook and Twitter announce that they're going to jointly ban any speech criticizing penguins, that will sound like an attack on free speech to me. Even worse if they install automatic filters in their chat clients, to block you if you badmouth penguins while talking to your friend privately. Even worse if cellphone companies join suit and begin filtering text messages. Even though all of these are private companies that are 100% within their rights.
Rigorous enforcement of property rights to the exclusion of all else just isn't enough to make society pleasant to live in. They need to be balanced out with right-of-way laws, fair-use laws, antitrust laws, all sorts of regulations to ensure that the big guy doesn't use his power to make the little guy worse off.
Freedom of speech is a basic human right, not a privilege granted by governments. When companies stifle speech, it's immoral even if it is legal. However, I think I made it clear that I am talking about not allowing companies to control speech by adopting a social network system that is decentralized.
If you're in my house and say things that I don't like, it's not immoral for me to kick you out. You can go say what you like outside. It's similar to companies allowing you to post your opinion on their service. If they don't like what you're saying, they have every right to make you leave.
Thank you for the analogy. I think I overstated my case in a way that sounds too general. I disagree with Google's terms of service. They impose restrictions that could limit productive discussion. They have control over identity I think is unreasonable. The concepts of social networks, online discussion, and identity seem like too big of a deal to let particular companies control them.
You know there is more to free speech than some words in the American constitution, right? A company can absolutely curtail someone's freedom of speech, it just isn't against the law for them to do so (usually).
So save your indignation for when someone suggests otherwise.
Google is a company, a company that's providing you a service free of charge. They are 100% within their right to tell you how not to use their product.