The portal is Washington’s opening move in a direct confrontation with European governments over who gets to decide what their citizens can read.
DAN FRIETH
Washington is building a portal to host content that European governments have banned. The site, set to go live at freedom.gov, would let users in Europe and elsewhere read some material their governments have ordered off the internet: content that fell foul of the EU’s Digital Services Act or Britain’s Online Safety Act.
Reuters reported that three sources familiar with the plan confirmed its existence. One said officials had discussed embedding a function so that traffic appears to originate in the United States, and that user activity on the site will not be tracked.
A portal hosted on US infrastructure, outside the reach of EU regulators, changes the calculus for anyone trying to read what their government has decided they shouldn’t.
The project is headed by Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers, who has visited many European countries since taking office in October and met with representatives of suppressed voices. Rogers has suggested that major pushbacks against EU and UK censorship laws are coming.
The context behind freedom.gov has been sharpening in real time. At the Munich Security Conference last week, French President Emmanuel Macron laid out a vision of the internet in which every social media user is verified by governments, limited to one account, and subject to platform blocks if regulators decide the platform isn’t complying. Anonymous speech would effectively end across the European market. Days later, speaking in New Delhi, he was more direct about the alternative. He called free speech online “pure bullshit.”
The UK is moving on its own track. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has confirmed that ministers are examining whether to extend the Online Safety Act’s reach to VPNs, the tools people use specifically to avoid being tracked.
In a public letter, Starmer wrote that the government is examining “Limiting VPN access for kids: to make it harder for kids to get around age limits of services or certain functionalities.” The technical reality: age-verifying VPN users means collecting identity data at the exact point where people are trying to shield it. A privacy tool that demands ID to function stops being a privacy tool. His office has also indicated that new delegated powers would let ministers expand the Online Safety Act’s reach without a parliamentary vote each time.
The freedom.gov portal is, for now, a holding page. But the impulse behind it reflects something real. Europe’s governments are building a system where every voice online is tied to a verified identity, where regulators decide what counts as harmful, and where platforms that don’t comply get fined or blocked.
That architecture expands, one delegated power at a time, one child-protection justification at a time, until the tools people use to read, speak, and organize anonymously have all been brought inside the perimeter.
A US government portal hosting the content European governments have deleted is an imperfect, politically complicated response to that trajectory. But it is also, at minimum, an acknowledgment that the trajectory exists.
This article (US Plans freedom.gov Website to Host Content Banned by EU and UK Censorship Laws) was created and published by Reclaim the Netand is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Dan Frieth
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