Even worse, it's a bad move if the US government can bypass our legal system by
1) showering money on European censorship advocates who use it to
2) lobby their own precarious centrist governments to create guidelines, czars and boards responsible for censoring speech online,
3) which US companies will be expected to obey worldwide in order to operate in Europe
4) allowing the US government and arbitrary billionaires to freely censor speech in the US.
Even if nefarious elements of the US power structure didn't take advantage of the eagerness of Europeans to censor the voices of what is increasingly the plurality of their voters, allowing US companies to capitulate is still an attack on US speech rights in general. It's a trade barrier, a collective tariff: either US citizens lose civil liberties, or US media companies cannot operate in Europe.
edit: the same thing happens with surveillance, or even with USB-C or GDPR regulations. The difference between surveillance/censorship and the last two is that weird phone chargers and the collecting of private dossiers on the public are not very important civil rights.
1) showering money on European censorship advocates who use it to
2) lobby their own precarious centrist governments to create guidelines, czars and boards responsible for censoring speech online,
3) which US companies will be expected to obey worldwide in order to operate in Europe
4) allowing the US government and arbitrary billionaires to freely censor speech in the US.
Even if nefarious elements of the US power structure didn't take advantage of the eagerness of Europeans to censor the voices of what is increasingly the plurality of their voters, allowing US companies to capitulate is still an attack on US speech rights in general. It's a trade barrier, a collective tariff: either US citizens lose civil liberties, or US media companies cannot operate in Europe.
edit: the same thing happens with surveillance, or even with USB-C or GDPR regulations. The difference between surveillance/censorship and the last two is that weird phone chargers and the collecting of private dossiers on the public are not very important civil rights.