Then won’t foreign governments just ban freedom.gov? This problem has already been solved with networks like Tor and I2P. It seems like it would be more strategic to fund those projects instead.
> This problem has already been solved with networks like Tor and I2P. It seems like it would be more strategic to fund those projects instead.
The US government is responsible for 35% of Tor's funding[1] and has been its primary sponsor since Tor was invented as a side project in the US Naval Research Lab.
It's a propaganda maneuver. And it's obviously just as critical of China as it is of Europe. The State Department's public voices may be immersed in the culture war but there are probably a few cooler heads left who have learned to keep out of the spotlight.
US can probably use their soft power to influence them not to do that. Also would imagine the US gov could also set up some more censorship resistant access methods.
Trade and tarriff relief are an option still. Despite how shitty the US has been and the distrust that will cause in the future access to US markets will be very attractive until the economy collapses. Soft power isn't just from countries liking you after all.
Access to US market? Is that a joke you are trying to crack? An “access” that literally depends upon how loud the orange fool farted on the commode that morning — that access and that market? I mean do you really not see what’s happening or you are just being a nice contrarian? Because this baffles me.
It's still a very rich market and I'm mostly looking to a post Trump world. I completely understand other countries are going to be much more dubious about giving things up permanently for long term promises but things like not blocking sites or allowing US access to the markets both of which can be easily in response to another Trump-esque flailing is a much easier ask and negotiation.
I'm not saying things will return to the pre-Trump semi-hegemony but I do think it's over the top to think the US economy will have zero soft power in the years after Trump too.
That surely is running out of steam. Everyone's got whiplash from trying to watch America and it's tariffs. How do you know it won't be applied anyway, or forgiven for whatever flavour of the day policy it changes to.
There is very little point in conceding to it when you'll have another opportunity for something else that might be more amicable before the inks dry on that tariff.
How would this work? Wouldn't a reciprocal tariff with identical parameters by the US against EU tech companies completely obliterate EU tech landscape?
Most EU tech companies probably have primarily European customers (given that services export from the US to the EU is much larger than the other way around). Second, all those EU customers are looking for EU alternatives that do not have a huge tariff.
Reciprocal tariffs would (for the EU) hurt export of goods much more, since that is where the EU has a large surplus.
The number of tech companies matters less than their scale. SAP, Spotify, and Dassault Systèmes likely have more economic impact than ten thousand tiny software shops combined. And notably, all three derive a huge portion of their revenue from the US market.
The US simply has more numerous and more important companies that rely on being able to freely export their services globally. The leverage here is with Europeans not only because of this asymmetry but because there is also more political appetite there to punish America than there is in America to punish Europe.
Are they though? Trump tried to use them to get ownership of Greenland a few weeks ago and just gave up. Then he tried to bully Canada again, and also gave up again. I think at this point nobody takes his offers of relief or threats seriously anymore, since any deal you make can be invalidated a couple weeks later.
There's a huge range of stuff way below trying to annex Greenland or the strong arming he tried to use against Greenland. This thread was talking about how the US could get countries to not block their free anti-censorship VPN not territory annexation. It's a way smaller ask, comparing them borders on absurd.
There are still loads of completely legally valid tariff and other trade barriers ripe for negotiation that existed long before the ill named 2025 "Freedom Day".
I think we're all aware that EU is trying to become more independent, but as of right now basically everything they do online, or really anything with technology at all, is American in some way. That's a lot of "soft power" and it will take decades, maybe a century, for EU or UK to replace it.
There are no tarriffs being applied on digital services. That's obviously intentional considering how much soft power those services exert on countries the USA wants to maintain an outsized influence over.
Tarriffs are a tax on imports to the US applied by the US government.
You can't tarriff selling a service overseas, in fact since AWS in other countries is a locally incorporated entity you can't even meaningfully demand they charge more AWS in the UK is a separate corporation incorporated and taxed under UK law, for example.
Right, I'm aware of that. Which is why I don't know why you brought up tarriffs in a discussion about the "soft power" that US technology services impose.
Because you said "that's obviously intentional" as though that's a thing that could be done.
My point was that tarriffs or other trade sanctions on Europe are hardly going to change the calculus or consumption of services by Europe - the most that could be done is accelerate the migration away, but European consumers wouldn't notice a thing by those mechanisms (because US digital services are an import - "kind of" - given actual corporate structures).
Sure, it's decreasing under Trump, but to pretend the richest, most militarily powerful, most culturally influential nation on the planet somehow doesn't have any soft power is... certainly a choice.
We already don't. We want the Americans to pack up their bases and fuck off. Ami, go home! They've done enough work to stir up chaos and war all over the planet in the last 7 decades.
Germany is free to exit NATO and close Ramstein. I believe it only requires a 1-2 year notice period.
The defense budget required to operate without US assistance is another matter entirely; you’re looking at doubling existing spending, plus hundreds of billions in one-off procurement costs — and that assumes ongoing access to US weapons systems.
The US subsidizes the massive weapons development programs you currently rely on; cost sharing agreements and unit purchases do not come close to offsetting the full sunk R&D costs the US covers.
Replacing those weapons programs, and the existing US industrial base and supply chain they depend on, would run into the trillions of dollars.
Just the R&D portion of the US defense budget is $150B a year — the entire EU’s aggregate defense R&D spending is only ~€15B/year.
A truly independent EU that did not depend on the US for its security would be a very different place.
It really doesn’t matter, the leaders who need to overlook personal grudges are the ones who do the wheeling and dealing here.
Probably worth noting that if the US isn’t at the head of the table, it’s moved to China by default, not Europe. Though their propaganda seems to be quite successful lately.
You've misread my comment pretty aggressively. Then again, this is about the level of discourse I typically get from "amerikkka bad" commenters, so I guess I'm not surprised. Anyways, China is trying to invade other nations, so that's a super moot point.
To be honest, only the last few holdouts in Europe still believe in the US nuclear shield. The fact that Germany is trying to make a deal with France should tell you everything.
Netflix, YouTube and OpenAI are completely meaningless and we could drop it tomorrow. NVIDIA and AWS are a different story. The only problem is that once things become transactional (as opposed to mutually trusting allies), Europe can leverage ASML and possibly ARM. So it doesn’t bring much soft power anymore, only mutually assured economic destruction.
In the same way they used their soft power to influence them not to block twitter and facebook? Because that power is slowly going from soft to limp...
This comment generated a lot of activity. It's very interesting watching the vote count of it move with the daylight (it went down during night in US/day in EU, and went back up when the US woke back up)
Sure — but the UK or EU has to accept the constant rhetoric of “you clearly don’t support free speech, you block freedom.gov” when discussing with the US.
I don’t think it’s meant to be a perfect solution; I think it’s meant to be a political tool.
Also, the US does fund Tor — originally US Navy + DARPA, now through Dept of State. Entirely possible that they’ll eventually operate a Tor onion site for freedom.gov too.
Late reply, but it’s not about mind games so much as rhetorical artifacts to actuate the levers of power.
When the US issues reports saying the EU is actively working against US values both within the US and globally, that report can be elevated by later US administrations to justify military drawdowns, exiting NATO, etc. The EU should produce counter artifacts demonstrating they do align with US values, but instead they responded as if this was a power struggle.
Your comment about “mind games” suggests too simple an interpretation:
This isn’t about what people believe is true, but what facts are available to the machinery of government policy making — much like litigating semantics and debating evidence inclusion within a court case.
This is about constructing the sentence:
“The EU’s widespread blocking of the freedom.gov free speech platform for the past decade demonstrates a divergence from American values that means NATO no longer functions as an effective vehicle for American vision on the global stage.”
I’m unclear as to what the difference is between my comment and your reply other than a more detailed explanation, which I do appreciate. You’ve just described “mind games”, though.
Maybe that's the purpose? Pushing European and global "allies" to show their cards. Some citizens will support more censorship, while some will start questioning. It's good to know where your rivals stand.
Also it is cheap, easy, non-controversial domestically in the US, and ethically coherent with American values.
> Pushing European and global "allies" to show their cards. Some citizens will support more censorship, while some will start questioning. It's good to know where your rivals stand.
I don't think European countries have been shy or sneaky about their restrictions on online content.
I'm a lifelong US citizen and burst out laughing at this. What values? What coherence?
Do you mean the NSA man-in-the-middleing all that traffic and leaving a backdoor for Mossad? Imagine the most despicable possible invasion of privacy and the most reprehensible shadow oppression and manipulation of an uneducated populace you can conjure up.
Now imagine something way worse than that. This is America.
Note that in 36 odd states in the USA companies and their officers (i.e real people) cannot boycott Israel (or even say nasty things) and then do business with the state.
But if you say the American government is occupied by zionists loyal to a foreign government, that's "hate speech" and would land you in prison if not for the enduring strength of the first ammendment (which several Europeans ITT think is bad, because they think "hate speech" is bad and they lack the mental fortitude to admit that sometimes right wing meanies might actually have a valid point.)
Yet another illusion. A lot of Americans are very good at finding ways to persecute people for having an opinion, often using economic consequences as a cudgel to enforce groupthink. And, at this very moment, the government is compiling lists of people it regards as enemies, purely on the basis of their "free" speech.
