I've been wondering this lately:

We are living a golden age of audio-visual entertainment. Specifically, the regional freedom of accessing all uncensored music, books, movies and games.

The explosion of the internet contributed for the shared knowledge across the globe, which is killing importing of physical media.
Consider a Netflix-like near future, where all kinds of world media is restricted by regional limitations. With deeplearning and ai algorithms, it will be easy to enforce strict monitoring on all uploaded media. Which will limit accessibility even more.

There will always be the free (black) markets, but it will be harder to get access to anything beyond what government figures pick.

In Lebanon, having good internet eventually will result in placing strict rules against piracy. Keeping physical (non-cloud) backups of the stuff we love, might turn useful sooner than we might think.
Weeeeell they still haven't defeated VPN + Torrent.
However it gets more annoying to get pirated material, and storage space is getting cheaper, so it is easier to just save the stuff you like.
Which is basically what you said.

I would be happy if there is good Internet in Lebanon, and anti-piracy measures is an acceptable price to pay for me.

All my software is free/open-source or bought. I don't get piracy because it may contain backdoors, etc. and I don't really need too, anything I use usually has cheap or subscription-based options.

I know there is a piracy culture that remains in Lebanon. I am not sure how widespread it is but I have seen IT managers use pirated software for routing, email servers, firewall, servers, etc. This is just wrong.
Governments are getting better at brainwashing people, now by controlling digital distribution of media. e.g accessible movies and websites... It's a matter of who's in control. Hardware advancements are built with control in mind.
With deeplearning and ai algorithms, it will be easy to enforce strict monitoring on all uploaded media. Which will limit accessibility even more.
This is about to happen in Europe with the passing of Article 13
samer wrote
With deeplearning and ai algorithms, it will be easy to enforce strict monitoring on all uploaded media. Which will limit accessibility even more.
This is about to happen in Europe with the passing of Article 13
Thank you for this information.

I feel like for the great part, this a useless additional oppressive piece of legislation, and I have become cynical when it comes to the EU getting involved in cyber-rights, after their wonderful cookie warning law.

If you would please allow me take this opportunity to give my opinion regarding the cookie warning law: It is stupid and useless, and it achieved so far to train millions of users to blindly click "Accept", caused millions worth of expenses to implement it, immeasurable annoyance and loss of reputation to the EU.

Back to Article 13, some of the things that make me think that it is useless:
- It solves a problem that I did not know we had. Youtube have been aggressively removing copyrighted content for a while. I suppose other major platforms do the same.
- It excludes "communications services" and "cloud storage services" so yeah I can see everyone storing copyrighted material on their cloud drives and sharing links on "communication services". I imagine that pretty much anything on the internet can qualify as a communication service - for example forums such as these.
- These rules apply to services with an annual turnover of more than €10m which again leaves room for piracy.

So I think this will do more good than bad.

My general outlook on internet legislation is please leave the internet alone, IT WORKS!

Sadly, it seems that legislation such as the cookie law was written by people who do not use the internet much and there is a real disconnect from professionals in this field such as UI or IT specialists.

I believe that if something has to be regulated, it is the quality of software specifically to improve the quality of life of users by increasing reliability, performance, usability and also reducing harm to the environment through waste of energy due to rubbish code.

Sadly I don't see much done there.
If you would please allow me take this opportunity to give my opinion regarding the cookie warning law: It is stupid and useless, and it achieved so far to train millions of users to blindly click "Accept", caused millions worth of expenses to implement it, immeasurable annoyance and loss of reputation to the EU.
This has become even worse with the launch into effect of the GDPR. While the spirit of the GDPR is great and yields many benefits to European residents, one side effect has been even more intrusive pop-ups asking you to accept being tracked. A lot of them use dark patterns to trick you into giving them consent, which takes us back blindly accepting these notices.

Oh, and if you're running an ad-blocker and can't stand those cookie notices, subscribe to this list and it will remove some of them: https://fanboy.co.nz/fanboy-cookiemonster.txt
What's more, if you refuse cookies, then there is not way to save your preference. So for example, if you disable cookies in your browser, then you will be punished with the cookie warning on every. Single. Page.

I agree that the GPDR is great in spirit. Putting the individual in control of their data is great. After all, if companies can control their data through copyright and licensing, and if this is the direction we will be going, then it is good and fair to extend these rights to individual private users.