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When people think about deregulation, they usually picture politicians repealing laws, slashing red tape, or opening industries to competition. Rarely do they think of a machine. Yet one of the most important expansions of human freedom did not begin in a parliament or royal court. It began in a workshop.
Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press is remembered as a technological revolution. It made books cheaper, accelerated the spread of knowledge, and helped usher in the Reformation and, eventually, the Enlightenment. But there is another way to understand its significance. The printing press may have been history’s greatest act of deregulation, not because governments removed rules, but because technology undermined a monopoly that authority could no longer effectively control.
The laws against heresy and unlicensed printing stayed in force. What changed was their enforceability. Therefore, in this case, we can use deregulation in an economic sense: a fall in the barriers to entry that protected established power from competition, brought about by technology rather than by decree. By that standard, the printing press transformed the information market more dramatically than almost any political reform in history.
The Original Information Monopoly
Before Gutenberg, information was regulated by scarcity. Copying a book by hand took months of skilled labor, costly materials, and a place to work, and those places were overwhelmingly institutional. Monasteries produced much of the Church’s texts; from the thirteenth century, university stationers rented out approved exemplars to be copied piece by piece under supervision.
This should not be overstated. Commercial scribes, independent workshops and booksellers also produced manuscripts, and neither monasteries nor universities controlled all of it. The stronger evidence concerns important texts. In the pecia system, which began in Bologna and became a regulated procedure at the University of Paris in the later thirteenth century, booksellers held university-approved exemplars and rented them out at regulated fees. In 1228, the University of Padua declared that scholars had to pay for copying a text at a price set by the university. This system existed in universities all over Italy, France, and England. Therefore, whoever controlled the accurate exemplar controlled which version of a standard text circulated cheaply.
Heretical writing could still circulate, copied by hand in large numbers. But it moved slowly, many copies could be traced to a scribe or workshop, and owning one could bring a heresy charge. Authorities could often rely on supervising the main production channels rather than building a formal censorship apparatus. Because production ran through institutions and identifiable networks, circulation was easier to monitor than it became after printing.
Economists often focus on legal restrictions when discussing monopolies, but economic monopolies can arise through barriers to entry as well. The medieval information order was characterized by exactly that problem. The supply of books was limited, production was slow, and access to knowledge was concentrated in the hands of a narrow elite.
In effect, high production costs acted as a barrier to entry that no one had to enact. Control was cheap because it sat on a few chokepoints, and the hierarchy of knowledge, meaning who could read, who could interpret, and which texts counted as authoritative, rested on a cost structure as much as on doctrine.
Birth of a Competition
The history of liberty is often the history of competition. Markets become freer when new firms challenge incumbents. Politics becomes freer when power is dispersed among competing institutions. Information becomes freer when established authorities lose their monopoly over communication. This is precisely what happened after the spread of printing.
A press was expensive to set up but cheap to run per copy, so a printer needed volume, and volume required buyers rather than patrons. Printers therefore had every incentive to publish what was sold rather than what was approved.
Luther’s early writings show the mechanism: printers in several cities reprinted them, often without his involvement, because they sold, and within a few years the Wittenberg monk was among Europe’s most widely printed authors.
New publishers entered the market. New readers emerged. Most importantly, new competitors appeared in the production of knowledge itself. By 1500, presses operated in roughly 280 European towns.
A fragmented continent added a political dimension. A printer expelled from one jurisdiction could resettle in another, and Geneva, Basel and later Amsterdam became publishing havens whose output flowed back across borders. The authority, which had once governed a captive supply chain, now competed with rivals for the allegiance of readers and with other states for the printers themselves. When Francis I ordered printing suppressed in France in 1535, after the Affair of the Placards, the decree proved unworkable and was soon abandoned.
The significance of the printing press was not that it destroyed authority. The Church remained influential. States remained powerful. Rather, it forced authority to compete.
Control as a Cost Curve
However, someone had to own the machine, and over time censorship and authority returned. Within a generation of the first presses, church officials began requiring that books be approved before printing, and within roughly a century the Church was publishing lists of forbidden titles. Governments followed. In England, the Crown gave a single printers’ guild, the Stationers’ Company, a monopoly in exchange for its help in policing what was published, an arrangement that lasted well over a century.
But the objection rests on a definition that no serious account of deregulation uses. Nobody concludes that the airline industry was not deregulated simply because aviation regulators still exist. What matters is whether barriers fell substantially and whether entry became possible, and by that test the press qualifies. Partial decentralization can be transformative precisely because the margin that moves is the one that bound everything else.
The reimposition of control is also evidence for the thesis. A system that controls information through scarcity has no need for approval boards, banned-book lists and chartered monopolies; building them was an admission that scarcity could no longer do the work. The substitutes were costlier and leakier. They required inspectors, review before publication, searches of shipments and the cooperation of printers who had commercial interests of their own. When a government liberalizes a market, established firms often lobby for new regulations to protect themselves from competition. The appearance of new regulations demonstrates that incumbents felt threatened.
Finally, control changed form, from preventing production to punishing publication after the fact, a slower and more selective instrument. The laws against heresy were the same before and after the press. The cost of enforcing them was not.
This suggests a more general way to think about technology and liberty. Authority over information depends on a ratio: the cost of producing and distributing information against the cost of monitoring and suppressing it. Law can change the second term, but technology can change the first, and when it does, formal rules may remain identical while their enforceability collapses.
Freedom expands without a single statute passing. Nothing guarantees the direction; cheaper monitoring can push the ratio the other way, as the state gazette and the broadcast license later did. When distribution costs fall sharply, control must be rebuilt at a higher price, and the rebuilt version is usually weaker than the original.
Gutenberg’s Heir
The internet repeated the same pattern. Distribution costs approached zero, competitors multiplied, and newspapers, broadcasters and publishers lost gatekeeping power. The responses followed the old script: national firewalls, takedown regimes and intermediary liability rules. The editor’s point recurs as well. The new Stationers are platforms, app stores and payment processors, private firms whose moderation decisions become the practical regulation of speech, sometimes under state pressure. Yet the baseline has moved, and no authority can now credibly promise that an unwelcome text will not circulate.
Artificial intelligence is a more interesting case, because it resembles the press more than the web. It lowers the cost of producing text, images, code and analysis, not merely distributing them. But training frontier systems demands concentrated capital, so ownership of the machine matters again. Early regulatory proposals, whether licensing regimes, compute thresholds or liability rules, range from sensible to plainly protective of incumbents.
Freedom’s Unexpected Engine
The conventional story of liberty focuses on constitutions, elections, and political movements. These matter enormously. Yet they are not the whole story. Sometimes freedom advances because people win arguments in legislatures. Other times it advances because innovators change the rules of the game entirely.
The printing press did not abolish censorship, destroy authority, or create a perfectly free marketplace of ideas. It did something far more important. It lowered the barriers protecting information monopolies and made competition possible where monopoly had long prevailed.
That achievement endured even as governments adapted and new forms of control emerged. The reason is simple: once the cost of communication falls, authority faces a problem it can never completely solve. Information gains more producers, more distributors, and more pathways than any central institution can easily command.
In that sense, the printing press was history’s greatest deregulation. Not because it removed all restrictions, but because it permanently shifted the balance of power toward individuals and away from gatekeepers.
The technologies of our own age may not guarantee greater freedom any more than the printing press did. But they remind us of an enduring lesson: liberty often expands not when authority voluntarily surrenders power, but when innovation makes old monopolies impossible to maintain.
