The Marsh holding at first appears somewhat narrow and inapplicable today because of the disappearance of company towns from the United States, but it was raised in a somewhat high-profile 1996 cyberlaw case, Cyber Promotions v. America Online, 948 F. Supp. 436, 442 (E.D. Pa. 1996). Cyber Promotions wished to send out "mass email advertisements" to AOL customers. AOL installed software to block those emails. Cyber Promotions sued on free speech grounds and cited the Marsh case as authority for the proposition that even though AOL's servers were private property, AOL had opened them to the public to such a degree that constitutional free speech protections could be applied. The federal district court disagreed, thereby paving the way for spam filters at the Internet service provider level.
In Lloyd Corp. v. Tanner, the Supreme Court distinguished a private shopping mall from the company town in Marsh and held that the mall had not been sufficiently dedicated to public use for First Amendment free speech rights to apply within it.
The case has been highlighted as a potential precedent to treat online communication media like Facebook as a public space to prevent it from censoring speech. In Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck the Supreme Court found that private companies only count as state actors for First Amendment purposes if they exercise “powers traditionally exclusive to the state". However, the Court's narrow holding avoided the Facebook issue.