> How is saying we are going to censor content on our hard drives any different than saying we are going to censor content on our switches?

Because there's generally only one party that controls the packet switches that serve households, whereas there are many different companies providing information services, even if there is some concentration there, too.

If you don't like censorship on Reddit, you can use 4chan instead, or Voat, or etc... In most of the country, you have one choice for high-speed broadband--maybe two if you live close enough for DSL to be competitive with cable modems. Replacing or adding to these competitors is EXTREMELY difficult in most places, because of the way that costs scale when putting wires on poles or in the ground. We put more restrictions on ISPs because they have control of "bottleneck" facilities.

People used to say that being gay was a mental disorder too. There's decent scientific evidence that transsexualism isn't one either. This includes documented cross-sex differences in some brain structures as well as studies looking at identical vs. fraternal twins. (the rate of concordance is WAY higher for identical twins.) Also, consider the fact that the condition has been around for thousands of years with documented history in across different cultures. (E.g., Hijra, two-spirit, etc...)

Sure, trans people probably more often have depression and anxiety, but... if your parents disowned you, your classmates mocked you, and nobody would hire you or associate with you... you'd probably have some mental health problems too. Yes, things are a bit better in most places now, but this is only a VERY recent development.

Title II isn't just something that the Obama administration decided to do arbitrarily. Consider the federal statute defining telecommunications: "The term “telecommunications” means the transmission, between or among points specified by the user, of information of the user’s choosing, without change in the form or content of the information as sent and received." 47 U.S.C. 153 (50). That's exactly what the Internet does. If it wasn't, TLS/IPSEC/L2tp, etc... lots of stuff wouldn't work. Other packet-switched networks were regulated as Title II telecommunications, e.g., Frame Relay. The fact that the Internet is connectionless and globally addressable doesn't change the fact that it's a telecommunications service, just like other packet-switched networks.

If "network neutrality" like rules hadn't existed with telecommunications networks since the FCC's 1970s-1980s Computer Inquiries, the Internet could have never been commercialized in the first place. You'd still be replying to this comment on a Compuserve-like service run by AT&T.

As many others have commented, more direct democracy is likely to make things worse, not better. The problem is, of course, Rational Ignorance, and the classic solution to that problem is representation. IMHO, the problem is that as the population has grown, the number of people per representative has increased dramatically over the last 200 years. Combined with some structural changes (i.e., fragmentation, competition) in the media, this means that politicians simply can't get elected without $. When money is more important than votes for being elected (because it effectively buys votes through a variety of means...) it's no surprise that politicians cater to those who fund their campaigns. None of this is particularly novel; Lessig has a great presentation on this going around, and a new book, too.

However, when you're talking about using "crowd-sourcing" solutions, IMHO the best way to do this is by using the 'net to enable what I'd call better "political proxies," and that's probably more representation. I'd be a lot more likely to go vote in a primary election if I knew... who to vote for to advance my political views, but collecting this information is a lot of work, especially if I want to avoid the influence of $-influenced information, seek out good sources of information, look at actual voting records, etc... and I want to do this for a reasonably large number of offices and candidates. OTOH, I'd be happy to trust someone I know who holds similar beliefs to do this and just vote their recommendation. And I'd be more willing to do that kind of research if I knew it mattered to more than just myself. This is the role that parties are supposed to fulfill, but the fact that there are only two of them (see: winner-take-all) makes this a rather blunt, ineffective instrument. Plus they don't help for primaries.

TL; DR, more direct democracy will make it worse, I'd rather have more effective, targeted representation instead, even if it just lets me know how to vote in primary and non-partisan elections.