Guide to destroy the digital age

German municipals try to forbid flashmobs. While I personally find a flashmob devastating dunes on the island of Sylt and leaving tons of party garbage behind plainly stupid (how about a garbage collecting flashmob in the woods or in the streets or the next park around the corner? Let's call it eco-mobs.. :), I really don't understand why everybody is crying after regulation immediately.

Let's sum up this little guide on how to beat the last freedom out of the digital age:

• Regulate. Regulate everything. Regulate users, bandwidth, frequences, browsers, the Internet, wlan usage and:
• Make it expensive! Claim taxes on everything from wlan adaptors to printers - ah hell, let's invent some tariff or tax (make it both) on paper itself - users can print out their emails after all.
  
• If regulation doesn't help: Prohibition and bans are classical methods every government should try at least three times every century whenever it seems appropriate
• Make everything digital look dangerous. Isn't WWW in principle absolutely the same like terrorism and isn't every gamer deep down in his heart a mass murderer? Also: Every man on the Internet seeks to rape little girls. One can't be too careful.
• Citizens need overparenting and patronizing. As everybody knows from political theory and philosophy, mankind is a beast (and childlike naive and uneducated) and has therefore be watched very carefully. The benevolent dictator works for Open Source projects, so let's apply the idea nationwide.
  
• If you can't gain anything by laws and regulations, go for industrial standards and data protection and DRM - never ever make something open and flexible in the first place and under no circumstances learn anything by the mistakes of others. So, while the music industry slowly learns its lesson about DRM, book publishers start all over with incompatible formats on ebook readers and tradtional customer lock-in services. No, noone will break DRM, because noone would want to read book X on reader Y. 
  
• If you're part of the industry, cry business-decline-wolf out loud and insist on protectionism by your government. By no means develop a new business model - insists even more on past models and ignore your customers. They will fall in line eventually and see the wrong in their doing and come back to watch TV like it's 1987. (Or buy newspapers and CDs.)
  
• If the downfall of business threat doesn't help, go more cassandra and proclaim The Decline of the West (sounds more dramatic in german, btw. - the translation doesn't do it justice. ;) Ebooks will destroy democracy As We Know It and not buying newspapers on paper will lead modern society directly into fascism, dictatorshop, rule of the mob, downfall of all freedom and to unemployment of overpaid editors anyway. Kittens will get killed.
  
• Don't forget to ignore privacy concerns in any case. Cross-border information exchanges in times of terror (can't be too careful...) is so much more important than petty privacy concern of some Tom, Dick and Harry (who doesn't understand anything about political business anyway - combine with the patronizing rule)

For this government services I pay a few hundred euros per months, so please by all means, govern me and rule over me!