>The idea is that you cannot just shoo protestors to protest in a little corner of the town where few see them. Because that impacts the effectiveness of a protest and can effectively squash revolution before it begins.

That might have been the idea of the California Superior Court. However, the Federal Supreme Court's role in that decision (Pruneyard) was relegated to determining the technical merits of whether the protesters' positive right to free speech guaranteed under the California State Constitution conflicts with the negative right to freedom of speech (that is freedom from government-compelled or government-limited speech)under the Federal Constitution [1]. The finding was that, in the case of shopping malls, California's interpretation is, with in its own borders, acceptable so long as protesters are given no special rights dissimilar to those of the conventional shopper. The protesters would have those rights so long as a) a protester has physical presence and b) a protestors access to infrastructure (i.e. areas to walk around) is the same as that of the common shopper. These requirements don't work for protesting at Costco[2], much less protesting on Twitter or the App Store.

If comparisons between not being able to protest on websites and "don't protest in the mall, do it at your own home" are being made, then these comparisons are superficial at best. A mall is different from a home in use and limitations. That's obvious from their respective designs. However, all websites have the same starting requirements (i.e. buy a domain name, rent/build/collocate, add HTML) and the same opportunities to be designed to the full needs of their owners. That's what one is purchasing when he or she owns a website. The right to a canvas. Not the right to a Twitter and the attention and investment that follows it. And spinning up a financially successful alt-Twitter was never a guaranteed right to begin with, anymore than spinning up an alt-Apple or alt-Microsoft would be. There is no secret money-making lever jealously guarded from the public by the mega-corporations to prevent fledging websites from becoming behemoths in their own right. The Internet is a medium. It doesn't solely or consistently function as a pulpit, product, or a content factory. It has no defined, concrete purpose in the way the Pruneyard Shopping Center did.

>The metaphor isn't perfect, but that's because the digital space is a very different area , and I sort of hate the constant comparisons of the internet to physical land in terms of ruling. If we had access to instant, worldwide teleportation technology in the 1700's, I'm sure we'd need entirely new rulesets and ethics to take this into account. That's basically what the digital space is.

I'm not requiring that the metaphor be perfect. But a metaphor or, more appropriately, an analogy, must be "like for like" even if such an analogy is not 1:1. To go back to protesting in a mall, competition in the digital space isn't banked on "land" or "territory". Facebook and its success isn't predicated on IPV4 address ownership or domain names in the same way that a manorial lord is with respect to his fiefdom. There isn't a neat division between hobby forums or commercial websites as there would be between a house and a mall. Apps are not based on "physical value" (nearly zero) or "physical size" (none). Thus comparisons to land or common areas are irrelevant. While what constitutes a "digital space" is hard to enumerate, it's clear that land or malls are not an appropriate framework with which to make such a comparison.

A better comparison for app stores, or websites in general, would be cable/satellite television. In television's case, value is determined by consumer response to content (as measured by Nielsen ratings and resulting ad dollars), not how many televisions are in every American household, how many satellites Ted Turner owns, or how many homes have cable wiring installed. The infrastructure behind it, past a certain threshold of saturation, is not the point. This is compatible with how competition for attention works on the Internet and is, certain limitations notwithstanding, a more appropriate comparison.

[1]https://www.thefire.org/first-amendment-library/decision/pru...

[2]https://law.justia.com/cases/california/court-of-appeal/4th/...