The entry barriers for anyone thinking of producing and distributing a newspaper or running a radio or TV station were too high for those without access to private capital or taxpayers' money to leap. Like the joke about capitalist freedom guaranteeing everyone an equal right to book a room at the Ritz, everyone was free to hire journalists as long as they were private tycoons or state-funded broadcasters. Journalism was an industry. If the Leveson inquiry had examined press regulation 20 years ago, it would have hit a nerve. Now, however, the costs of publishing on the internet are effectively nothing. The space available to write in is effectively limitless and the potential audience is an ever-increasing proportion of the world's population. Anyone can publish on the web. Anyone can shoot a film on their phone or camera and put it online. Freedom of the press, once the professional concern of an elite or a guild, is now everyone's concern.

Lord Justice Leveson was therefore doubly wrong. Journalism was never a profession, and it is not now an industry. Old newspapers are dying not because readers are deserting them – the editors of the Guardian, Mail and Telegraph groups publish to enormous online readerships – but because advertisers have left them. If everyone can be a journalist, every organisation can be an advertising agency. They can promote job vacancies, homes for sale and every other good and service that used to be advertised in the press on Gumtree, property sites or, indeed, in the case of retailers and large employers, their own websites. The hacking scandal appears to be about over-mighty media organisations exploiting new technologies for criminal ends. Yet it comes as new technologies are destroying media finances. Outsiders see the arrogance of power and miss the stench of death — Leveson more than most. In his statements at the inquiry and draft recommendations, he envisages a new standards body with powers to provide "credible remedies" at a low cost to those who feel the press has treated them badly. He wants membership of his new body to be voluntary — state regulation still sounds a touch North Korean. If a newspaper does not volunteer, however, perhaps because it is wary of establishment quangos, it would suffer. If a complainant sued for libel, "exemplary damages" might flow "because the paper could have had this resolved very easily in a different system".

The journalists he imagined having to pay exemplary damages were not the Peeping Toms of the tabloids but the staff of Private Eye. They investigate shady deals in the City, corruption in local government, the misuse of public funds, and the invasions of privacy by the very tabloids Leveson was examining. Rather than sniff celebrities' underwear, they attempt serious, investigative journalism. English lawyers and the wider establishment always say that this is exactly the type of reporting they wish to encourage. And yet, as if some strange magnetic force were pulling them, they penalise the best rather than the worst. Leveson did not pull himself up short, and say that the English law should strive to make the work of Private Eye easier. Instead he mused at length about how, if its editors "created additional cost", by appealing to what is, after all, the law of the land, "they'll have to pay for it". Fifteen years ago, Brin warned that an excessive concern for privacy would lead to a loss of accountability. "Without the accountability that derives from openness — enforceable upon even the mightiest individuals and institutions — freedom must surely die." Leveson shows no understanding of the danger. Indeed, he appears to wish to exacerbate it.

Gove responded, as anyone who understands how technology has changed publishing would have responded. He asked what the judge meant by a newspaper title now that the journalists' guild has gone. Would blogs, Facebook pages and Twitter feeds be titles? All who write on them publish their work. Must they sign up to the judge's new regulatory board or face "exemplary" punishments?