One of the reasons a noticeable number of British people felt that EU membership offered a suboptimal return on investment is the perception of over-regulation. While the merits of this point are debatable, clearly it’s a meme. I don’t really have much of an opinion about it other than to encourage that people be left alone to do what they please unless it truly becomes a serious problem.
One issue I do have a strong opinion on is a type of regulation that is, to me, clearly terrible: criminalizing WWW hyperlinks to copyrighted material. Yesterday the EU Court of Justice apparently did just that.
Here’s a good article by the EFF describing the problem.
This is not a new issue. Here’s a good article from 2007 from John Dvorak which also is worth noting. He says, "If linking without prior permission is infringement then the web is dead." I pretty much agree with that. On the other hand, if all web content goes through two social media hubs the web would seem to be dead for that reason too, but, it lumbers on. Perhaps we can call it the World Wide Wheel based on its new and not improved topology. But I digress.
The only positive aspect of this I can see is if all scientific publishers hosting proprietary content go out of business because their articles inevitably and knowingly link to proprietary scientific publications. Not going to hold my breath.