It’s not a press regulator, it’s a web regulator.

Since the early 1990s, hundreds of millions of words have been produced about the Web. Enthusiasts have told us that it is the greatest communications revolution since Guttenberg invented movable type, and they are probably right. Utopian fantasists have imagined that cyberspace would be beyond the reach of governments – those ‘weary giants of flesh and steel’, as one particularly giddy theorist put it – and they were certainly wrong.

Their libertarian dreams, as we can see tonight, were an illusion. Those ‘weary giants of flesh and steel’ are tougher than they look. They are more than capable of using the new technologies to their own advantage, while censoring what their citizens write online. In the past, I would have directed you to China, Iran or Belarus to see web censorship. But now we can get all that at home.

Politicians and broadcasters are talking tonight as if those hundreds of millions of words had never been written, and we are still living in the pre-Berners-Lee age.