From what I can tell, the Internet still does effortlessly defy regulation. The _businesses_ that operate on the Internet from meatspace don't. Because they c

From what I can tell, the Internet still does effortlessly defy regulation. The _businesses_ that operate on the Internet from meatspace don't. Because they can't, at a fundamental level. They're based somewhere. They have visible employees in jurisdictions. They represent enormous juicy targets with tens, hundreds, thousands of millions of users to control. They're huge companies. They have management structures, bureaucracies, whole departments that result in the sort of nonsense we see like GDPR popups or country blocks. That's not the Internet of 50 years ago; it's not even the Internet of 20 years ago. Alternatively, you could simply think of it like this - the everyman has been regulated. The power users (for lack of a better term) are in much the same situation that they were in 1990. If you discount the fact that 'everyman' expects everyone to be on the "hip new platform" (fb, snap, insta, tiktok, whatever) then honestly the situation is way better than it was back then. It's just hard to ignore the cruft.