Internet freedom is increasingly under threat. But one group has done far more than any other to defend it: the founders of the United States and their great enduring creation, the Constitution. Because faced with escalating global efforts to censor free speech online, the First Amendment stands resolute in guarding our freedom.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's Washington Post article last Saturday offering an extraordinary surrender to authoritarianism. Referencing Facebook, the CEO stated, "Lawmakers often tell me we have too much power over speech, and frankly I agree."

Anyone want to spot the contradiction there? Facebook's nominal raison d'etre is to serve as a space for empowering speech by people who might not have had a platform in ages past. That Zuckerberg would thus wish for government constraint over speech is deeply concerning. But the former Harvard student makes clear that that's exactly what he wants. Zuckerberg continues his essay by calling for a "common global framework -- rather than regulation that varies by country and state" to govern what can be posted online. This, Zuckerberg says, "could set baselines for what’s prohibited and require companies to build systems for keeping harmful content to a bare minimum."

A "common global framework -- rather than regulation that varies by country and state." Those are some very dark words. After all, they represent the subordination of democratic authority to global constructs. And when we consider that China is one of those governments most sympathetic to the idea of global rules, the concern quickly escalates.

Fortunately, the First Amendment ensures that even if a plurality of democratic governments support bans on controversial online speech, American speech will always remain protected. We should wish for that protection because healthy societies do not thrive by censoring and chilling controversial speech. They thrive by empowering individuals to write unpleasant things and thus freeing others to consider, if only to refute, controversial ideas.

The founders rightly recognized that while some controversial ideas are inherently negative, others are immensely positive. But unlike Zuckerberg, they also realized that you can't get the latter without tolerating the former.