US launches Freedom.gov anti-geoblocking portal for Europe

The US government has quietly rolled out a new website, Freedom.gov, marketed as a way for Europeans (and “worldwide users”) to access content blocked under local laws. The landing page is pure Cold War cosplay — “Freedom Is Coming” — but the more interesting detail is bureaucratic: according to Reuters, the portal is meant to help users circumvent restrictions on material ranging from alleged hate speech to terrorist content. Yet domain administration appears tied to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), a branch of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Guardian reports.

That mismatch matters because “internet freedom” tools historically survived on one core design principle: don’t centralize trust. For years, the US State Department’s Internet Freedom program funded open-source, privacy-preserving circumvention technologies built by distributed teams close to local threat models — tools used by journalists and civil society in places like Iran and Myanmar when regimes throttled or shut down the network, the Guardian notes. Those systems are auditable, decentralized, and built to minimize metadata collection.

Freedom.gov, by contrast, looks like a single, opaque choke point: a government-run distribution channel that could, by design or by mission creep, become a log factory. Andrew Ford Lyons, a consultant who worked on earlier internet-freedom efforts, told the Guardian that the new approach concentrates traffic through a US federal agency rather than through multiple privacy-preserving projects.

This is where the project’s paradox becomes unavoidable. If you’re a European user trying to evade your own government’s speech regime, do you really want your traffic routed through a US government system — one that sits inside DHS’s institutional orbit? Even if the intent is benign, the incentives are not. Centralized services invite “helpful” retention policies, compliance obligations, interagency data sharing, and the kind of quiet legal compulsion that never makes it onto a galloping-horse homepage. The US has an extensive surveillance and lawful-access toolkit; Europeans know the acronyms.

The geopolitics are almost too neat. European regulators have tightened platform liability and content controls via the EU’s Digital Services Act and the UK’s Online Safety Act. Washington, meanwhile, has been loudly complaining about European speech constraints. Freedom.gov reads like an escalation: not diplomacy, but infrastructure — a state-operated bypass aimed at allies.

If this is a free-speech project, it’s a curious one: replacing a plural ecosystem of independent tools with a single US-government-controlled gateway. In practice, it risks turning “internet freedom” into a soft-power product — and offering dissidents, journalists, and ordinary users a new question: which state do you trust to not keep receipts?