I clearly said no moral obligation. That covers your claim of Free Speech as a principle. A private organization does not owe you their bandwidth.
> then you're essentially saying that it's okay if it costs millions of dollars to speak freely on the internet.
No. Go buy a RaspberryPi for $35. Now you can host your own site and say whatever you would like on the internet. Again, nobody owes you anything. Nobody is obliged to carry my message. You have a right speak freely. You do not have a right to be heard.
> You have a right speak freely. You do not have a right to be heard.
"You have the right to speak freely as long as you can't effectively do it"? Not much of a right then, is it?
I wonder what would have happened to the civil rights movement or the women's right movement if people with that kind of attitude had existed back then? Those were widely opposed movements back then too.
> "You have the right to speak freely as long as you can't effectively do it"
That's a pretty gross misrepresentation of what I said. Think of it another way. Prior to the internet could TV and radio stations be forced to play an ad they disagree with? Could newspapers and magazines be forced to print ads or op-eds they disagree with?
You cannot force someone else to carry your message. If you are unable to broadcast the message yourself and nobody else is willing to broadcast it for you then that is your own issue. No private entity is responsible for giving you a platform.
A Raspberry Pi can be trivially overloaded with a simple DOS attack. (Not even DDOS.) If you've got anything remotely controversial to say, I wouldn't count on that being sufficient to keep your site online. The infrastructure necessary to remain online during a coordinated attack isn't cheap; that's why Cloudflare advertises DDOS protection as one of the many services they offer: https://www.cloudflare.com/ddos/
Whether or not a cloud infrastructure company "owes" content-neutral treatment to their customers is a matter which, I think, is up for debate. Particularly in this day and age where the internet has become such an important venue for political speech.
> then you're essentially saying that it's okay if it costs millions of dollars to speak freely on the internet.
No. Go buy a RaspberryPi for $35. Now you can host your own site and say whatever you would like on the internet. Again, nobody owes you anything. Nobody is obliged to carry my message. You have a right speak freely. You do not have a right to be heard.