The internet is a case where the concept of negative liberty really proves itself. It has had a chance to develop in a way almost completely free from government regulation, and some pretty eccentric or arbitrary institutions managing it. Why does one charity in the UK manage all the domain names? What gives them the right, some might say? The point is it doesn’t matter: the system emerged spontaneously and the accidental result is that essentially everyone can obtain a domain for relatively little cost, making complete freedom of the press a reality for the first time (something unheard even in theoretical positive rights theories until it started to happened spontaneously). This has already had tremendous benefits in terms of faster, more efficient trading, cheaper goods, access to vastly more information for a huge number of people, all leading to massively greater overall human welfare. And we have only just got started. Negative liberty (freedom from state coercion) created a space that allowed this to happen. And it couldn’t have been predicted by any individual or agency in advance of it happening.

The one thing it isn’t and will never be is entirely equal. Some people will always lack some faculties required to access ALL of the new goods. But everyone will benefit from some of it, and, if it is left alone, more and more people will benefit from more of it.

You might want it to evolve EVEN faster than it is in a perfect world. But if the alternative is bring the hammer of the state down on it, so that it ceases to evolve according to the free actions of individuals in co-operation and competition, then you won’t know what benefits you destroyed – and what extra benefits would eventually have been available to the very people you invoke as deserving of equality right now at this point in time.

The article is very English-speaking US-centric, too. It’s all very well to say that videos need subtitles, but a lot of videos already have translation subtitles, so you’d have to have separate files for each translation language and for the transcription language rather than burning the subtitles in to the video. I don’t think there’s an easy way to do that just now, and again, it would massively add to the time needed to make a video and put it online.

Any sort of regulation increases costs for producers, which will impact disproportionately on small producers, allowing the larger ones more advantages in the market, reducing the overall diversity of content, the best thing going for the internet right now. Regulation would also serve to rule out the development of voluntary solutions and standards which have served many aspects of the internet very well up until now and will continue to develop if we leave it alone – those evolved solutions will turn out to be better than what can be set down in legislation.