FedEx and Nike did that because being associated with the Redskins was bad for their brand. I am still confused on how this is controlling speech. Companies make decisions to align with what consumers want all the time. Can you give an example of how this could be bad?
You do not know a lot of history (or even present, if you want to glance over at China and others) if you do not think that a consortium of big businesses and an activist government that supports and enables them cannot together have a pretty chilling effect on a freedom of speech. What worth is it if you can never use it?
Not saying that ditching "Redskins" or "Indians" is equivalent to that -- far from it. But the worst-case downsides of using economic pressure to bend opinions, the media, and entertainment are obviously.
How about we say a media outlet spreads a news story worldwide unflattering to a totalitarian regime. The regime is mad about this, and instructs its subsidiaries (directly or indirectly related) to pull ad dollars from the outlet, and they threaten to kick out any multinationals providing any sort of support for that outlet from their market. The outlet caves rather than go out of business without ad money. "It's just business" is an insufficient description of that.
If you want a softer version of it, companies can use this power to whitewash and airbrush their own history, too. Disney has been working for decades to make
Song of the South unavailable. Is that on net a good thing to let them scrub their history like that? Certainly removing past associations with racism and antisemitism are valuable to the House of Mouse and its stockholders today, but are we all served by being unaware of that history?
CC that gets rid of racial slurs is fine by me. CC that protects past or present evil... is not.