If our government is going to make laws governing information, then we should optimize for truth and signal, over lies and noise.
The objective should not be maximizing the ability to make money off of information. Nature provides natural incentives for discovering new truths, we don't need any unnatural ones. In fact, the unnatural incentives on information production actually incentivize lying and noise, rather than truth generation.
I'm surprised this is such a minority opinion, but very few people are with me on this (those that already are---❤️).
What kind of a system maximizes truth?
Well, what is truth?
Truth is when someone publishes a set of symbols with the claim that they accurately predict something about the world and then later sensors verify that those symbols did accurately predict it.
These truths are extremely helpful. They give us warm buildings, useful electricity, cures for disease, lenses to see more, safe transportation, and so on.
There are also kinds of information that might not necessarily make accurate predictions about the world but don't pretend to. Fictional stories or songs or jokes meant to amuse. These are fine and also have natural incentives (the love and admiration from your peers, for example).
Then there are lies. These are symbols that claim to predict things about the world that don't, in fact, hold up when the sensor data comes in. Much of advertising falls in this category.
Finally, there is also noise. Noise is often truths repackaged in extremely verbose, obfuscated, or scrambled order that wastes people's time and can mislead.
Other than total censorship, I cannot think of a worse information policy than the one we currently have in this country, where it is not legal for someone to edit published information and republish their edited versions. Where it is illegal for someone to create a repository of maximal truth.
We need smart people to delete all this noise, to distill all the signal, and deliver truthful, efficient information to the public. This needs to be legal, not illegal.
Truth needs to be the thing to optimize for, not royalties.
It's time for the IFA.