EU Digital Services Act pushes geoblocking and localized moderation

Europe and the United States are now arguing about “free speech” the way empires argue about “peace”: by building infrastructure.

The immediate trigger is the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which forces large platforms to assess “systemic risks” and mitigate them, including risks tied to illegal content and alleged harms to civic discourse. As the New York Times reports, that compliance pressure is increasingly translating into geography-specific moderation: geoblocking, localized filtering, and EU-only product decisions. The underlying logic is straightforward. If a platform faces asymmetric legal exposure in one jurisdiction, it will engineer the product so that the risky speech simply never appears there—or never appears to EU users.

Technically, geoblocking is the easy part: IP-based location, account-country signals, payment metadata, device locale, and sometimes SIM/operator information. The hard part is “extraterritorial compliance,” where a rule written for EU users bleeds into global policy because operating two speech regimes is expensive, reputationally risky, and operationally messy. The DSA’s enforcement model—large fines, ongoing audits, and regulator scrutiny—pushes firms toward the lowest-variance option: standardized, preemptive removal.

Washington’s answer is not to defend a neutral internet, but to build its own layer of state mediation. The Times says the Trump administration is exploring a portal branded Freedom.gov to help Europeans (and others) access content blocked under EU rules. The New York Post adds that the project is pitched as a way around European restrictions—effectively a government-run on-ramp to material filtered by platforms inside the EU.

In practice, such a portal would need to function like a proxy: either a web gateway that fetches content on a user’s behalf, a curated index pointing to mirrors, or a bundled VPN-like service. Each option collides with the same uncomfortable fact: a state proxy is, by design, a choke point. Whoever runs it can log users, fingerprint traffic, and decide which “banned content” qualifies for rescue. The U.S. government is not famous for resisting the temptation to collect metadata, especially when it can be justified as “protecting democracy.”

So we get the charming symmetry: Brussels insists it is merely regulating platforms, yet ends up incentivizing a Balkanized internet of national filters. Washington insists it is merely helping users bypass censorship, yet ends up proposing a state-run gateway that would be trivial to repurpose into surveillance or propaganda.

A takeaway is less romantic than both sides’ rhetoric: speech markets don’t stay free by being “managed” by rival bureaucracies. They stay free by minimizing jurisdictional veto points—something neither the DSA nor Freedom.gov appears designed to do.