“The internet has no limited central choke points through which data flows”
Yes it does. It has central nodes, it has regional nodes, and it has local nodes. It is structured in a way that government could gradually regulate it.
It is already being contemplated to “protect” from cyber terrorism, or other “homeland security” purposes
Not to mention that some new exploit appears every week which allows traffic to be hijacked through routers in China, DNS queries to be spoofed...some of the choke points aren’t even intentional.
Of course they’ll try. The Holy Roman Church tried in 1500. Printers were ‘licensed’ in the early days. The FCC came along and got in the middle of radio and tv programming last century.
But I maintain that every effort so far made to throttle the interweb thingy has met with spectacular failure.
Music downloads. Porn. Mainstream movies. “They” tried stopping all that stuff back when the internet was new and had much less popular usage (and corresponding political clout) than today.
Yet at this very moment the world wide web is more ubiquitous, and with more content of ALL descriptions more widely available to more people than ever before.
And it will be more so tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.