US reportedly builds freedom.gov to route around EU network blocks

European officials are bracing for a new kind of transatlantic quarrel: not over tanks or tariffs, but over who gets to decide what Europeans can see online.

According to The New York Times, EU policymakers fear a Trump-era escalation aimed at the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), the bloc’s flagship regime for “systemic risk” management on large platforms. The DSA empowers Brussels to demand risk assessments, audits, content-moderation process changes, and access to data from so‑called Very Large Online Platforms—backed by fines that can reach a meaningful share of global turnover. It also encourages geographically scoped enforcement: if a platform can’t or won’t comply uniformly, it can segment features, moderation rules, or availability by jurisdiction.

That is the part the EU rarely advertises: the DSA’s risk-based compliance model makes the internet more “nationalisable” by design. When regulators require differentiated obligations, firms respond with differentiated products—geoblocking, local identity checks, local content filters, and local appeals processes. The architecture of a borderless network starts to look like a set of fenced gardens with customs posts.

Enter Washington’s apparent counter-move. Der Spiegel reports that the US government is developing a portal dubbed “freedom.gov,” framed as a tool against EU network blocks. Details remain sparse, but the concept is blunt: if Brussels normalises filtering and access restrictions, the US can offer a state-branded circumvention and information hub—an “anti-censorship” infrastructure that is, inevitably, also an infrastructure.

The EU sells the DSA as technocratic safety engineering, while the US (under Trump) positions itself as the patron saint of free expression. Yet both sides are converging on the same outcome: state involvement in the routing layer of speech. One side builds compliance pipelines and audit trails; the other builds a government portal to route around them. Either way, the citizen ends up with more politics embedded in the network stack.

The immediate risk is escalation by precedent. If the EU can pressure platforms into EU-specific controls, it invites retaliatory measures—whether diplomatic, regulatory, or technical—from the US. And if the US starts shipping “freedom” tooling as a geopolitical service, Brussels will predictably treat it as foreign interference rather than a consumer workaround.

The long-run consequence is less glamorous than the rhetoric: a balkanised internet where the default answer to cross-border disagreement is to harden borders in software. The DSA didn’t invent that trend, but it certainly gives it a tidy legal wrapper—and now Washington appears eager to respond with a wrapper of its own.