In different terms: forcing open devices and unfiltered Internet by government decree clearly is the correct policy.
Recently (2019ish) we saw some bad examples of censorship where tech giants Google and Apple decided to ban some applications from their markets related to the Hong Kong protests.
It provides another example of why all significant general computing devices must be viewpoint neutral, and open to application loading and modification. In particular, (as of 2022, they may be forced to open in the future) Apple Computer Corporation maintains a closed ecosystem as a general policy and maintains significant restrictions on the actions non-approved applications can take on their devices. In other words, the censors on the App Store would function as censors for the entire swath of protected devices (30+ percent of installed devices in Western countries). Already mobile device providers and tech giants have to act at the behest of their home governments, making the completeness of the information you can access questionable. That is, you have to wonder whether you are being served propaganda in whatever you see on the device. Remember also, the print media also does not broadcast your location to your stalker ex-husband, nor to insurance companies ready to yank your coverage. It does not have microphones or cameras. So if these companies choose to take this approach, in fact they clearly are worse than the print media they attempt to replace – and not worth contracting with for anything other than entertainment, if that.
When core operators of the Internet fiber nodes or last mile providers decide they want to filter content, again they turn their services into mere entertainment nodes, unreliable for serious work.
Also, as these are large established companies, often acting on the behest of a government on account of search warrants, intelligence requests, or viewpoint discrimination re: COVID dissenter suppression, this feeds the general environment of mistrust and anti-business and establishment sentiment, building to the civil war.
We want to avoid coercion; we don’t want to throw people in prison just because they do something we don’t like, if it has no compulsory functional ripple. But, in some situations we have to take a hit because our alternative isn’t “live and let live”, it is someone is going to die (gun control vs. not), or spend money (route that highway through a neighborhood), and the question is how bad is it going to be. In this case it is a choice between doing without, gross waste, and coercion to a trivially more efficient solution.
Here, the immediate thought of fallback is to keep your reliable print media going, and rely on a postal service or a private delivery system. However, that doesn’t replace face to face or telephone interaction, live education, etc. So just accepting that all computing, national infrastructure, and radio links are worthless is giving up too much support to civil society, in particular the need for us to work out issues by talking to each other instead of routing things through large (but notionally friendly) corporations whose filters have inherently limited capacity, hence ability to identify issues and persuade.
Then let’s consider an alternative computing and telecommunications network. Laying billions of dollars of duplicate fiber and ripping up half the country (involuntarily impeding others along the way) to do so? Replacing billions of dollars of devices, or jailbreaking them all and then having to maintain the OS security without source code (which isn’t a complete solution either, the silicon could be corrupt)? You could consider some sort of short-range ad hoc mesh network as a means to bypass spectrum limitations, but that still doesn’t get you to computing devices, and as the number of simultaneous users and amount of traffic increases, rapidly you will hit saturation.
Consider the coercion alternative: force the providers to provide auditable devices and unfiltered communications. What does it cost them? Not quite nothing, because in theory you could have a delta amount of extra bandwidth consumption. The major problem is with chip IP; to have open standards for this changes quite a bit about the way that IP is protected in semiconductors. So to simplify the argument, consider that the only changes we impose are that you provide a verifiable network tap (so you know what is being sent in and out), the ability to load alternative code on the general purpose processors, and the ability to disable proprietary functions that do things like send encrypted fingerprints. These things cost millions of dollars, which is far less than the billions or trillions of dollars associated with the alternatives.
In summary, the options are: (millions of people die and otherwise suffer) make it significantly harder to run an already poorly-performing democracy and liberal government, (effective coercion via charitable waste) pay trillions of dollars, (“normal” coercion) or raise general taxation by a much smaller amount than the replacement cost, to compensate private providers for the costs of secure, auditable systems.