Who are the vigilantes of the internet?

I have been reading NowPublic for a while - so, like many others I decided that I would get an account and write a bit on what I saw out on the internet - that doesn't make me any better than any other who writes here, in fact nothing does.

But I began asking myself questions about this, NowPublic, and other blogging, News platforms.

Firstly I asked what make me any different than the millions of other bloggers out there - the simple answer is, precisely nothing. 

We all like to write and we are all opinionated so we have our say in the virtula world that is this alternative to real life - but is it?

To us, we are still alive and we still interact with each other by writing - others use far more sophisticated means to get their message across. So that by default is still real life.

Then I began to ask deeper questions about who polices us? Who are the ones who, in this part of our lives, controls what we say or do - and the revelation to me, was that it is exactly the same people who police us in our bubble that isn't the internet. - yet, for the internet it is worse.

Before the internet we went to the pub or bar, said our piece there and that was among friends and enemies alike. So nothing has changed there.

Before the internet we would wait days to interact with people who are on the other side of the world, now it is instantaneous. 

Before, we would get our newspapers of choice and read them some articles we actually liked, other we just thought that it was a pile of crap and we would buy a different paper tomorrow - though we never did.

But now, we have something that we didn't have before with media - we have a legitimate vigilante movement - legitimised by those who we elect.

The large monopolies that are media companies can now stop us doing what we would not even think about in our other part of our lives of interaction - they can stop us sharing through both conversation and effect. We would take that newspapers with us and show a friend a piece we had read in the newspaper and, either agree, or argue the point. If you want to do that today, or in a short time in the future we will be charged once again for that information to be passed on.

Now would you, in the pub have some Tom, Dick or Harry saying to you "Hey, you can't show him that he has to buy his own paper!"

In some countries he would have been shot - in others a mild to severe expletive would have been gesticulated.

SO the question arises - who are the vigilantes of the 'net - and why? They call it copyright, we say exchanging ideas and conversation pieces.

Why should we have to pay for something we have already paid for - in our time looking at those God forsaken ad's?

In the 'real world' being told that you have to look at adverts before you can read a newspaper you had paid good money for would have gone out of business overnight - so why do we, the public of the internet allow corporations to force us to look at what we don't want to see and pay for the priverlege yet are not allowed to exchange our thoughts on it?