Hearing about stuff like this, it's easy to imagine a future in which the 'bootstrapped' internet startup is simply no longer possible due to the costs of complying with various governments' regulations.
Unfortunately most of my peers call for more and more regulation of business and all technology. More regulation is always good in their eyes.
I've explained how regulation should be viewed as a constant push and pull, as society needs to be willing to repeal a regulation if it's not logical or relevant.
Unfortunately the word repeal and regulation in the same sentence is dirty and I get looks for even mentioning how large unnecessary barriers to entry via regulation isn't always a good thing.
In some ways this is why I support crypto currencies. Not for the scams and pump and dumps of today, but rather the building of a decentralized internet that may survive the lawyers and usher in a new era of freedom and creativity. Of course we are still about 5 years from having a GitHub or a search engine on top of crypto currency at the current rate of development. Unfortunately the bubble craze attracted a lot of unsavoury characters that is currently doing this space a lot of harm. Thankfully the lawyers can't shut Bitcoin down so we're safe for now.
What's stopping bad actors from foregoing these protections in an unregulated/decentralized world? The perfect example of this is what's going on with frivolous ICOs and crypto exchange "breaches" where consumers are losing because their ordinary consumer protections are not being enforced.
If it's anything like USC 2257 or obscenity law, it's a wildcard law to be played when there's no other dirt on somebody. The implementation is left intentionally vague. They won't provide you a national registry to check against, nor will they license you government software that fulfills these goals to legal specifications. It's a law they put on the books with no clear path to compliance.
So you're left to your own devices to implement something that may or may not do the job ("we checked hashes against a blacklist!")-- which you can arbitrarily be found in violation of by the courts at some later point ("...but you didn't do enough to check for derived or modified works!"), since there is no precedent for the extent to which one is expected to comply.
Nobody will be prosecuted for this until there's a high-profile site that needs a takedown.
History shows us there are many people that either do not understand or believe in free speech.
We encourage people to upload and share content they don't own under the guise of "information wants to be free".
We encourage the transformation of employees into contractors and operate in locations where the business is explicitly against the law, because "disrupt all the things".
We work behind the scenes with our competitors to suppress worker wages, fix prices, and avoid taxes, because profit is more important than anything else.
We do ICOs with imaginary money or IPOs with only private shares to get around the SEC and little nuisances like public disclosure.
WTF did we expect to have happen? The government is a slow elephant to SV's sleek mouse, but when we don't run fast enough we're going to be completely flattened. This isn't new behavior on the part of the government - it's not like we can claim ignorance.
> what caused governments to use regulations instead of alternatives (including doing nothing)
It's the same as it always has been - why are any rules made up? Because someone cheats. Why do rulebooks get bigger and bigger and not smaller and smaller? Because someone sees the rule "do not steal", and threatens the victim into "giving" him the stuff, cause "it's not stealing if he gives it to me, right?" Now you need rules about coercion.
More directly, people flouting the spirit of the law is the cause of this legislation. People ignoring the verbal and written warnings put out there by governments to play nice.
Ultimately, the government has two forces of authority. The law (regulation) and force (police, army, etc). The first is empowered by the second. If the warning signs leading up to regulation are ignored, what else can we expect the government to do?
I would say it's the opposite problem:
We pretend that publicly accessible information can be owned.
Hell, we've been "pretending" it long enough that the concept of ownership of ideas is included in the US constitution.
Know what else we "pretend"? That someone bigger than you can't just come along and take your lunch. We as a society agree to "pretend" that the lunch is yours, and that someone who does take it from you should be punished.
I think we're well past the point where we're "pretending".
> That someone bigger than you can't just come along and take your lunch.
No we don't, and I don't think we ever have. In fact, we openly admit that someone can come and take your lunch. What we do is say that, while someone can come and take your lunch, that person also has an incentive to avoid punishment.
Or perhaps not everybody agrees with you on the point that all information wants to be free. I, for example, don't agree. I'm quite happy that you can't legally take a photo I create and use it for your own gain.
As to the other point, replace 'can't' with 'shouldn't'. Sorry.