Whoever has read “The Pillars of the Earth” or “World without End” by Ken Follett, contemporary literary masterpieces set in a rural medieval society, can imagine what it meant to live in a world where Catholic Church had both spiritual authority and temporal power.

As Rick Falkvinge points out, that was possible thanks to a substantial monopoly over information. Mr Falkvinge, founder and leader of the Swedish Pirate Party, reckons that power has always been consequence of an information advantage. Of course new technologies, such as printing press, threatened those advantages and were thus hardly fought… until the United Kingdom, on May 4th 1557, took a different approach and created a monopoly called copyright.

It’s interesting to find similar reactions across history with the subsequent big innovations: TV and radio have always been monopolies until relatively recent times. And even in wealthy countries like Italy, member of the G8 but ranked only 65th in the 2008 Freedom of the Press chart, they’ve just turned into controlled systems with very poor competition.

Of course there’s a notable exception: everybody can be user of unlimited information and even editor of original content through the Internet. No revolution has ever had the potential of the world-wide-web. And the effects are already starting to become clear in the most advanced and free countries.

Yes, the surprising election of Mr Falkvinge to the European Parliament is a very good example, but not the greatest…

Reading advice: Yes We Did! An inside look at how social media built the Obama brand.