He was well aware that one cause of the enthusiasm was that his work was being read by a mass audience, obtaining volumes at very low prices. And the reason for these low prices was that Dickens wasn’t getting royalties. His cheering fans were reading pirate copies.

Dickens made intellectual property rights one of the causes of his life. He dedicated The Pickwick Papers to a politician who championed the first copyright law. He endured a fair amount of criticism in the US from people who thought he was restricting freedom and abusing American values and culture. But ultimately he succeeded.

In his last years and after his death, a combination of social and political pressure, economic self-interest and law-making turned the jungle of publishing into a regulated and reasonably law-abiding industry.

We have reached the Dickens in America stage of the internet and social media. The case for law and social norms has become overwhelming.

The argument for a self-confident approach to regulation rests on the fact that we have so much to gain from the internet. It’s not just that we can’t switch it off, but more that we wouldn’t want to.

In the past 200 years, literacy rates have risen dramatically, producing and exploiting an explosion of knowledge and information. Now this information has become widely available, with all the advantges you might imagine.

The rise of this newspaper owed a great deal to the ability of The Times to get the Post Office to deliver foreign dispatches and publications to its offices before others received them. There were frequent disputes over priority and payment, often involving changing relations with the government of the day and officials. And few, including the newspaper’s own staff, could check that the information provided was true. Accidental fake news was common and accountability rare.

The internet and social media undermine attempts by any organisation or government to control the flow of information. They are an immense aid to liberty and accountability, spreading power to every person who has a connected device. To read a copy of The Times today and 50 years ago is to be struck by just how much more writers and editors now know, how much surer we can be of our facts, how much more we can convey to readers.

It is true that people spend a lot of time online, but much of that is communicating with others. Those who regard it as gormless used to say the same about television which brought entertainment and information into so many homes. They forget about the sheer boredom (by coincidence, a word popularised by Dickens) of life for many before those developments.

What, though, about the idea that social media are hacking away at our political life, producing polarisation? The idea that we are listening only to people who agree with us and tuning out others? In his recent book Everybody Lies, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz argues that the opposite may well be the case. He cites a range of studies with this common feature: you are more likely to encounter someone with opposing views online and share information than you are with people in the rest of your life. Your family, neighbours and workplace are more politically homogeneous. We have more Facebook friends than real ones. Online we encounter more diverse contacts.

This may be the reason why online abuse has shocked so many people. Political abuse has always gone on but victims used not to know what their attackers thought or how they expressed themselves.

While social media are often a boon, online abuse, fake news, privacy breaches remain serious problems. In fact we have been so dazzled by technological development that we have often thought of online communication as another world. As if libel isn’t real if it’s on Twitter. Or Holocaust denial doesn’t matter as much if it’s on Facebook. There’s an idea that it’s simply freedom and we can’t do anything about it.

This is not true. Under political and social pressure, Google, Twitter and Facebook have recently been shifted from their absolutist belief that anything goes. They have begun to accept some of the obligations of publishers and have started to act against abuse. We have our foot in the door. They can be pushed much further. They shouldn’t make money out of hateful or libellous content. They shouldn’t profit from fake news. They shouldn’t abet deeply antisocial behaviour. A combination of the law and social pressure should prevent this.

I am a strong believer in free speech but the social and legal rules that govern paper and ink can’t just stop with pixels. The attempt by the senators Amy Klobuchar and John McCain to pass an Honest Ads Act in the US is an example. This would apply online some of the rules governing campaign advertisements on television and in newsprint, including requirements to disclose who has paid for them. Matt Hancock, the culture secretary here, is right to press on with age verification and other methods to help ensure children access age appropriate content.

Of course the sheer volume of online information makes the task of regulation hard and provides many ways of avoiding the law or ignoring good practice. But the inability to make things perfect doesn’t mean we can’t make things a lot better. The sheer concentration of the market on big companies like Google and Facebook is a help. As is the ability of artificial intelligence to assist them reviewing content.

There comes a moment, as with Dickens and copyright, as with Teddy Roosevelt and the railroads and American robber barons, where a new market is mature enough and powerful enough that it needs new rules. This moment has come for online communication.

Let’s rejoice at the era we live in but let’s show a little grit and determination too.

daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk