Seems to me...
...the problem here is that the real problem is that we have engineered ourselves into this corner in the first place. Yeah, I know that's not directly productive, but the key point is that I'm not sure there *is* a good answer to "how can we reasonably handle this situation in its current form", when the 'situation' is that the internet is clearly a vitally important forum for information interchange, but you *need* the services of one of a handful of random private companies to put something on the internet in such a way that any vaguely capable jackass can't take it down again.
There's *kind of* a parallel with newspapers and book publishers, I guess, but it's not a very good one at all. In the first place, newspapers obviously have to be *highly* selective in any case - they can't print anywhere *near* all of the content submitted to them (unsolicited articles, comment pieces, letters, whatever). And there's a much broader ecosystem of book publishers, and the cost of setting one up (or a magazine or whatever) really isn't very high at all, so that's a much more robust ecosystem. And Before The Internet you could at least just print out a bunch of pamphlets and go hand them out in the street or whatever; yeah, it's not *as* effective as getting a book or academic paper or newspaper article published, but the gap is a lot less stark than the gap between being On The Internet and not being On The Internet.
I dunno, doesn't seem like there are any exactly easy answers.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
