Piracy Means Internet Needs Guardrails

Michael Lynton, of Huffington Post, demands that the final frontier be regulated. Here's why:

Freedom without restraint is chaos, and if we don't figure out some way to prevent online chaos, the quantity, quality and availability of the kinds of entertainment, literature, art and scholarship we need to have a healthy, vibrant culture will suffer.

As an avid supporter of both free information and protection of media (and profit), I go back and forth about this sort of thing all the time. I hate the RIAA's litigious douchbaggery, but am reluctant to commercialize the internet anymore than it already is. The problem, as Lynton states, is that the internet is literally a cyber-wilderness, where software pirates make the socio-economic contributions of the internet murky at best, and he proposes a semi-socialized solution in the vein of Eisenhower's Interstate Highway System. My great fear is that internet regulation, like Eisenhower's project, will have to be cast as a security issue, in a time when we've been fear-mongered enough.