alt Hacker NewsFlawed analogy. Cigarettes are physical goods, and regulating them does not spread easily to other things.
Everything online is virtual, and implementing surveillance in one area, almost always spreads, infecting everything else, until we've built 1984.
Most of us are old enough for 'you wouldn't download a car' nonsense...
But as adults that are starting to have kids, this "hard divide" between physical and virtual starts to break down. What I mean is that we can't always use the excuse that we can't apply some reasonable law just because an item isn't "physical".