The First Amendment gives free speech a free reign if you are an American.
Given then that the US "invented" the internet, well okay, Tim Berners-Lee, a Brit, gave it a bit of a kick, there has been a sort of underlying assumption that it should be underwritten by the First Amendment.
But as we know given its global impact it is not yet free and open.
The net may be moving to a new paradigm - the App - which gives us all our own walled garden. Yet Apps are both free and chargeable unlike web sites. Well, that's not quite true - the FT has charged for a couple of years where it has been joined more recently by The Times and others in the NewsCorp camp.
Will more news channel web sites charge? They are all watching the NewsCorp experiment hoping it works.
However, this throes up another issue - when is a blog a blog? Can it only be when it is free for all to read? What if an App that acts as an aggregator of blogs appears and charges?
Is charging to read for a blog an anathema to the whole concept of the net?
I doubt it.