We’re past the point of debating whether to regulate the Internet. That ship has sailed. It’s painfully obvious that the ease with which a nation-state actor can spread propaganda necessitates some form of regulation for security purposes.

Because the Internet doesn’t belong to one nation, there are many different ideas as to what that regulation needs to look like. The biggest problem in the “everything should be free!” viewpoint is the assumption that all cultures around the world will converge on western democratic values. That‘s honestly a pretty arrogant assumption (though shared by many in the west).

There absolutely needs to be some framework — I’m just not sure the author proposes is the right one. I normally like Ben Thompson’s frameworks, but the categories he proposes are not MECE and very hand-wavy. It’s a good start to thinking about the problem, but there are a lot of business models aside from ad-supported that drive problematic behavior as well.