The governments of the world have had enough of the age of online anarchy. Governments are trying to figure out how to make them behave, trying piecemeal regulations and laws, responding to each new Big Tech outrage with another regulation. The European Union is the leader in this, but dozens of other governments are trying their own solutions. In Australia, for example, the federal government set up an Office of the e-Safety Commissioner in 2015 to work co-operatively with Big Tech to protect children from online harms.

Its remit has kept expanding as digital dystopia keeps growing and now ranges from cyberbullying to revenge porn and paedophilia. The ACCC is suing Google for harvesting private information about people's locations to sell targeted ads. The company didn't tell people that turning off "location history" wasn't actually enough to turn off location history, says the ACCC. And now the Morrison government is holding community consultations about its planned bill to create a code of conduct for Big Tech firms that, if they flout, the government promises to make binding. Morrison's guiding principle, he says, is that "the rules that exist in the real world need to exist in the digital world".

But this is all about finding sticks to manage titans. The country reaching for the kryptonite is perhaps the one least expected – the US. The Trump administration and some legislators are considering not just a patchwork solution but a panacea. It would be a fundamental change. You can tell it's getting serious. Tech chiefs used to celebrate the internet as "the world's largest ungoverned space". Now, after decades of resisting any regulation, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg last week pleaded for some: "Big Tech needs more regulation." Knowing that more regulation is inevitable, Zuckerberg shrewdly is trying to stay at the negotiating table to minimise any constraint.

The potential solution? To remove the legislative loophole that allowed all of the mayhem in the first place. Big Tech sought, and won, a little-known magic power in 1996. It's a legal clause called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Section 230 essentially protects the tech firms from the consequences of whatever they might publish, screen or sell on their platforms. It was the difference between treating them as publishers, which are responsible for what they circulate, and bulletin boards, which bear no responsibility for what third parties may post.