The Internet Is Not a Souped-Up Post Office

There’s a persistent delusion—mostly found in the more libertarian corners of Reddit and among privacy maximalists with a fondness for Latin—that the internet is just a digital Royal Mail. A neutral conduit. A sacred channel for unmolested correspondence. And that any attempt by governments to monitor traffic is tantamount to steaming open envelopes in a trench coat.

This is nonsense.

The internet is not a post office. It is not a cathedral. It is not a sacred grove. It is a system. And systems, especially global ones, require oversight. Not because governments are perfect, but because the alternative is worse.

Magna Carta was about barons not browsers

There’s a peculiar tendency to invoke the Magna Carta whenever someone suggests that traffic analysis might be useful. As if King John, in his infinite wisdom, foresaw TLS handshakes and Tor exit nodes while squatting in Runnymede.

The Magna Carta was a peace treaty between a petulant monarch and some wealthy landowners who didn’t want their castles repossessed. It was not a manifesto for anonymous browsing. It did not anticipate packet switching, nor did it contain a clause about onion routing. The idea that it somehow prohibits traffic monitoring is a bit like arguing that the Domesday Book guarantees your right to delete cookies.

Common Law fares no better. It was built to resolve disputes over livestock and hedgerows, not to adjudicate whether your metadata counts as personal property. The notion that centuries of precedent entitle you to untraceable crypto transactions and unmonitored Telegram channels is a legal fantasy—one that collapses the moment you realise your VPN provider is based in the Cayman Islands and answers to no one.

Offshore banking is not a human right

Once the preserve of yacht-owning tax exiles, offshore banking is now available to anyone with a browser and a mild disdain for HMRC. The frictionless nature of global finance means you can route your income through three jurisdictions before breakfast, all while tweeting about digital sovereignty from your rented flat in Leeds.

This is not liberty. It’s regulatory arbitrage. And it’s made possible by the same infrastructure that privacy absolutists insist must remain untouched by government oversight. The irony is delicious: the louder the calls for digital freedom, the easier it becomes for oligarchs, scammers, and assorted crypto evangelists to move money without consequence.

Global hookups have local consequences

The internet’s global reach means your personal data can be scraped in Sheffield and weaponised in Shenzhen. A single breach can lead to extortion demands from someone whose name you can’t pronounce and whose jurisdiction doesn’t recognise yours.

This is not a theoretical concern. It’s happening daily. The same protocols that allow for cross-border collaboration also enable cross-border exploitation. And yet, any attempt to monitor traffic flows is met with cries of tyranny, as if packet inspection were equivalent to waterboarding.

Governments, for all their flaws, are the only entities with a mandate to protect citizens from this kind of abuse. Pretending that traffic monitoring is incompatible with liberty is not just naïve—it’s dangerous. It leaves the field open to actors who do not care about your rights, your laws, or your Magna Carta.

Rights without context are just slogans

The right to privacy is not the right to invisibility. It is not the right to operate a botnet from your shed. It is not the right to scream “Magna Carta!” every time a packet gets logged. Rights exist within systems. Systems require oversight. Oversight requires visibility.

If you want to live in a world where no one sees anything, you don’t want a democracy. You want a blindfolded bureaucracy. Or worse, a libertarian commune with no plumbing.

Less romance more reality

The internet is not a realm of pure freedom where Common Law principles float serenely above the cloud. It is a tool. And like all tools, it can be used well or poorly. Pretending that monitoring is inherently evil is not principled—it’s lazy. It’s the digital equivalent of refusing to wash your hands because soap might be authoritarian.

So let’s retire the parchment metaphors. Let’s stop pretending that packet inspection is a moral failing. And let’s start treating the internet like what it is: a public utility with private consequences. One that needs watching.

Even if that means your VPN gets a little sweaty.