US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere

I just chaired a session at the FOCI conference earlier today, where people were talking about Internet censorship circumvention technologies and how to prevent governments from blocking them. I'd like to remind everyone that the U.S. government has been one the largest funders of that research for decades. Some of it is under USAGM (formerly BBG, the parent of RFE/RL)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Agency_for_Globa...

and some of it has been under the State Department, partly pursuant to the global Internet freedom program introduced by Hillary Clinton in 2010 when she was Secretary of State.

I'm sure the political and diplomatic valence is very different here, but the concept of "the U.S. government paying to stop foreign governments from censoring the Internet" is a longstanding one.

Can someone ELI5 how it actually works?

Say I'm a UK citizen with advanced glioblastoma (implying loss of faculties, seizures, and pain; no cure, and things to worsen before eventually passing away, possibly some time from now). Suppose I wish to view websites on euthanasia options, but am blocked from doing so by the UK's Online Safety Act.

How does/will Freedom.gov help? (is it essentially a free VPN?)

Also, as others have pointed out, couldn't the censoring government simply block access to freedom.gov?

As someone who lives in North Carolina and can't even open most mainstream porn sites, I too am waiting for the freedom

Such an irony that there are two sides trying to control the Internet in their own lovely ways and in the end it's the people who will have to suffer one way or the other. But I do think countries around the world should have a hard look at how the Internet is, even today, de facto controlled by the US. Take ".com" and ".net" domains for example. Like there are efforts underway to get away from SWIFT (and hopefully one day USD as well), this should be independent. In a way, at least in the long term, this US administration might be a net positive for the world at least in the term of depolarisation. Or maybe the focal points will shift from existing ones to new ones.

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.

What about all the age restriction stuff coming online here in the US in various states? Those are cool right?

This service is definitely a honeypot for tracking.

A state sponsored vpn is probably not (only) gonna do what you think it's doing.

If something looks like MITM, chances are it is MITM.

I'm guessing China will simply block it at the firewall. It would be hilarious to witness the US Gov validating The Pirate Bay's hydra domain approach. Maybe some squatting isn't a bad idea:

freedom.live freedom.xyz freedom.space etc.

Text-only, no Datadome Javascript, HTTPS optional:

https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1WCCeV...

Simple HTML:

   { 
     x=AA1WCCeV
     ipv4=23.11.201.94 
     echo "<meta charset=utf-8>";
     (printf '%s\r\n%s\r\n\r\n' \
     "GET /content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/$x HTTP/1.0" \
     'Host: assets.msn.com') \
     |nc -vvn $ipv4 80 |grep -o "<p>.*</p>"|tr -d '\134'
   } > 1.htm
   firefox ./1.htm

Until you have to validate your id/age to continue...

Seriously though... we have one segment undermining foreign lockdowns while the same and other segments are literally doing the same here.

Won't those other nations just ban freedom.gov?

What content bans does Europe have? /Confused European

All content will likely be pre-approved by Larry Ellison and his other billionaire friends, so how much freedom will this really have?

Will this bypass the porn bans in conservative states

Fun hypothetical question - will it be restricted to users in sanctioned locations (where it's most needed) because of, well, sanctions?

Sad that western Europe is pushing so hard for limits to free speech & privacy. I'm not surprised given their history, but it's sad nonetheless.

Anyone know why this would be appearing on the front page but completely absent from https://news.ycombinator.com/active

Previous discussion: https://www.reuters.com/world/us-plans-online-portal-bypass-...

Weird title, but worthy of discussion. From the little info available so far this appears to be little more than political posturing. If you want to fight censorship, an "online portal" to access all the censored content is the wrongest possible way to go about it. But we'll see.

Orwellian quotes are bandied about so much these days… does anything more need to be said?

So it'll have porn?

So going forward all countries will be providing citizens of other countries free access to the internet whilst censoring their own citizens?

That's not very "America First"

Why are my taxes paying for benefits for Europeans?

They already killed USAID.

All the while the FCC was grilled yesterday for trying to shut down free speech. Make it make sense.

Does this mean we will be able to read RT from Europe again?

Last copy if from 2005 (2) according to the Web Archive. I like vote from 1998, if Internet Remain Tax Free (3).

1. https://web.archive.org/web/20050209024923/http://freedom.go...

2. https://web.archive.org/web/19981201060504/http://freedom.go...

"The Net Interprets Censorship As Damage and Routes Around It"

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/07/12/censor/

Do they plan online portal for content banned in the U.S.?

Is that going to accelerate copyright violations for AI training? https://cuiiliste.de/domains contains just a lot of piracy sites.

Or they could just make a donation to Tor and similar projects, and get way more mileage for their money.

Wild flex from the country that literally bought their own tiktok to control the propaganda.

Cool, maybe I'll be able to access www.census.gov from outside the US now

It's kind of ironic given how much USA is censoring content based on their interest.

Can I use freedom.gov to bypass age verification though? :)

Do they plan to allow residents of various US states to access sites that are now required to have documented ID evidence?

at one point, HN was anti-censorship. this discussion shows how ideologically aligned this concept has become.

there are volleys back and forth of "what censorship" followed by links to wikipedia enumerating it. RT and Joe Rogan are thrown in the mix.

when did this experiment fail?

Screams giant honey pot to me.

And my taxes need to fund a VPN when there’s 50 cheap VPNs on the market? What happened to reducing spending?

Maybe they can redirect from stupid.gov

>"and added that user activity on the site will not be tracked"

Until it will. Please do not make me laugh. This will probably be used to help organize converting regimes or look for potential spies. Not denying possible positive value. If they're so generous they should expose Youtube this way and some generic communication platform if they believe they can pull it off (reliable ban bypassing)

Finally, a resource for oppressed people in backward countries to find information about abortion.

The joke that I saw online was "Does it have Colbert on it?"

Excellent. I look forward to other service providers responding by cutting traffic from the US.

If the goal is to balkanize the internet, this administration has hit upon an excellent step.

"Portal team includes former DOGE member Coristine"

"...user activity on the site will not be tracked."

Ok, stopped reading right there.

Can it be used to help people in the Bible Belt watch porn?

I would have loved to be in the meeting where they were wondering how to replace the highly costly and complex influence tool that was USAID, and then someone said:

- Why don't we just make a website?

- Yes let's just do that.

The irony is big in this one.

This reminds me of "Radio Free Europe" and "Radio Liberty", which were basically bankrolled (and likely largely influenced) by the CIA. They wanted to distribute all kinds of programming into USSR that was banned there, same with Solzhenitsyn's books etc. Eventually the USSR fell apart.

Now they are treating Europe like they treated USSR. Musk and other big influencers on X have already been calling for the breakup of the EU, after the EU fined X $100M. I bet that was at least some of the reason behind this.

The irony is that the Trump admin has been deporting non-citizens for speech, his FCC has been intimidating media like ABC and CBS into firing people or canceling programs and interviews, his DOJ has been telling social networks to fork over the identities of citizens who criticized ICE online, and his CBP will begin demanding that tourists hand over 5 years of their social media history, as well as their biometrics, family's information and whatever else.

This is the administration who would lecture Europe about freedom of speech? Didn't they just get through 10 years of telling European countries to be "nationalist" and resist the influence of their own federal government in Brussels -- but I guess we can just ignore their laws and broadcast anything into their countries, tempting them to set up a "great firewall" like China.

Well, if freedom of speech means violating other countries' laws, in this case can European governments just start streaming copyrighted movies for free to US viewers, and piss off the RIAA / MPAA? Or maybe they can do what Cory Doctorow has been proposing: https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2026-01-29...

It's like when USA ignores European trademarks (actually even stronger, PDOs) like Champagne or Parmesan but expects Europeans to honor US trademarks.

But will they put the complete Epstein files on there?

This is also going to debut in Saudi Arabia, right?

...Right?