I agree, but I think that you might be looking at it a little bit too much as of a conspiracy as well.
IMO it's not even about closing loopholes and stuff; it's about increasing their popularity to make sure they get reelected / get more money. That's it. I think short-sightedness of politicians explains pretty much all of it.
Current democracy as a system optimizes strongly for popularity, and optimizes people with any kind of long-term agenda out of the system.
This is what democracy has always done.
It's not one or another. It's a group of people with diverse agendas. When their interests align enough then a change is introduced in the system. There might be a predominant reason but unless you're in politic groups I think we can only make guesses. I believe that we are as disconnect to them as they are to us.
This is just attempting to gain the control they had before and have now over every other media. They can prevent hard porn on TV or in the window displays of high street video rental shops. Why not the internet?
From their perspective the internet is a loophole they are trying to shut down.
Internet freedom happened incidentally as a side effect of how the technology worked. It wasn't brought around by ideology like traditional "free press" was.