ElectronicsQuestions on Nostr: Indeed. The printing press was banned, with increasing penalties as time went by and ...

Indeed. The printing press was banned, with increasing penalties as time went by and the use of it still increased. At the end, the use of a printing press was punishable by death! All this to "prevent the spread of dangerous information".
The printing press, obviously, didn't go away, but being a physical object, it's not exactly comparable to protocols and data on a highly surveilled Internet, when there are even technologies to identify people on how they write. Probably nowhere near perfect, but for totalitarian regimes, which soon (if not already) seems to be all regimes, it's more important to state examples than making sure the examples are actually the ones intended.