It's a desire to keep a truly revolutionary invention, the most significant since the invention of the printing press, which evolved in a "lawless" environment,

It's a desire to keep a truly revolutionary invention, the most significant since the invention of the printing press, which evolved in a "lawless" environment, from being harmed by excessive regulation by political powers that are often driven not by doing good, but by doing something to get re-elected. The political system moves extremely slowly, is often targeting conditions which are already obsolete, and is a sledgehammer, not a scalpel when it comes to technology. Just look at the way anti-hacking laws are abused to put people who do something as innocent as vandalize a college calendar entry in jail. Look at Aaron Schwartz. Can the court or legal system tell the difference between cookies meant for tracking, and cookies meant for single sign-on or mashup authentication? Can politicians write laws to deal with the reality of fast moving web and native platforms without creating loopholes for abuse that result in lawyers abusing the system? The online communities were self organizing and self regulating. A sort of virtual Burning Man. From the WELL, to USENET, to the Modern Web, we've had 3 decades of "lawless" evolution, in which relatively few people have been harmed by legal behavior. More people have been imprisoned or had their livelihoods destroyed by "regulation" than those supposedly hurt by ad-tech. The people being Dox'ed, the people being assassinated because of posts on Facebook or Twitter by Mexican drug cartels are not being hurt because of data center hosting policies. We fought the Communications Decency Act I and II in the US and the Clipper Chip in the 90s, because we didn't feel the government had any business getting involved in online publishing and services. I wrote one of the first anonymizing proxies on the internet to hide publisher locations from the government (http://web.archive.org/web/20011129060515/http://www.clark.net/pub/rjc/decense.html http://web.archive.org/web/20011129060515/http://www.clark.n...). I have watched for decades how laws intended to do good things to protect people on the net have in fact been used to harm people. That makes me deeply skeptical. In software copyright, in software patents, in censorship laws, in cryptography regulation laws, in "privacy" laws (drafted by entities who themselves have a vested interest in state surveillance)