A company with significant coercive power (through sticky market effects) is much better thought of as a governmentesque censoring entity rather than some mere group of individuals exercising their individual speech. What you're describing is not a virtue of the first amendment, but rather a shortcoming of its implementation and a subsequent failure to properly regulate corporations/LLCs/etc. OP is right - people's ready embrace of corpo-authoritarianism when it lined up with their social mores set the stage for where we are at now. That comic has always been a low point of Munroe's.