Comment Re:Slippery Slope.. or is it? (Score 1) 284
Also, the text of the 1st amendment starts "Congress shall make no law". Nothing in there applies to private entity. The first amendment has *nothing* to do with this case.
Correct. There is no right to free expression guaranteed in the US Constitution, despite the many people who seem to think its penciled in there somewhere. The right explicitly guaranteed in the US Constitution is the right to expression that is free from government interference. The Constitution bars the government from restricting expression unless it has an overriding state interest to do so (i.e. the canonical yelling Fire in a crowded theater). But the Constitution does not allow the government to compel a private person or institution to regulate its speech in general; in fact that is precisely what the First Amendment bars the government from doing. Absent an overriding state interest to do so, the government cannot force Baidu to provide a specific kind of speech, or prevent them from eliminating certain kinds of speech from its output.