Until 1968, every new play in Britain required a licence from the Lord Chamberlain's Office before it could be publicly performed. There was no legislation attached to this, so the Lord Chamberlain could censor as he chose.
Can you imagine introducing such a rule today? How about applying for a license before launching a website?
It was the moral panic of the time.
In 1959 we got the Obscene Publications Act and that got used quite a bit during the Thatcher years with a new moral panic - video nasties. Video nasties weren't just Chainsaw Massacre stuff they also had a thing to say about society.
Police raided quaint little video shops and did their best to enforce the law, sometimes getting it wrong, well, often getting it wrong.
This only encouraged the market in 'Video Nasties' so in 1984 they brought in a new law to get this moral panic under control.
You could say that the law had been updated for the medium of the era - VHS cassettes - and that they could not be bothered with the stage any more.
However, the stage is a public place, you have people congregate in an audience and they could be a dangerous rabble. In 2000 we got the Terrorism Act and that followed on from the Criminal Justice Act that had came along earlier in the 1990's to make it illegal for more than four people to get together to listen to 'repetitive beats'.
There are plenty of laws regarding what you can and cannot say online and people have been prosecuted for saying not so nice things on Facebook. You might not have to apply for a licence to run a website but that is not so enforceable when you could put your website online in a country far, far away.
Actual censorship has got a lot more refined over the decades. As has propaganda. A lot has gone on over the last twenty years of widescale internet usage, however it will be a while before we find out what this is.
You don't have that, but in Germany and Austria you must include your full name and address in any website you publish, which creates sort of the same effect.