The most dangerous censorship regimes rarely arrive wearing jackboots. They come bearing safeguarding frameworks, compliance dashboards, and well-meaning phrases like online harms mitigation. Britain's Online Safety Act is precisely this kind of weaponised niceness — a sprawling regulatory apparatus that now claims jurisdiction not merely over British speech, but over American speech, on American platforms, protected by the American Constitution.

This is not simply a regulatory disagreement. It is a foreign power attempting to override the First Amendment by proxy, using fines, access threats, and extraterritorial enforcement to force US companies to censor speech that American law explicitly protects. If Russia tried this, we'd call it information warfare. Because it's Britain, we call it "coordination."

John Stuart Mill would not.

In On Liberty, Mill offered what remains the most devastating argument against censorship ever written: suppressing an opinion robs humanity twice — if the opinion is true, we lose truth; if false, we lose the opportunity to understand why truth prevails. Either way, silencing speech makes society epistemically weaker. And crucially, Mill insisted this applies not only to polite speech, but to offensive, unsettling, destabilising speech — the kind that most urgently tempts regulators.

The First Amendment is essentially Mill's argument constitutionalised. It protects speech not because speech is always good, but because society cannot reliably distinguish good speech from bad speech without hearing both. And because once governments acquire the power to silence ideas for moral reasons, they inevitably use it for political ones.

Britain, by contrast, has travelled in the opposite direction — constructing an ever-expanding architecture of "harmful but legal" speech regulation, enforced through Ofcom, and backed by fines that scale to corporate extinction levels. The UK now treats speech not as a liberty but as a hazard class: something to be risk-managed, throttled, filtered, or removed.

And now Britain wants Americans to live under that system too.

Extraterritorial Censorship is Still Censorship

The Online Safety Act empowers British regulators to compel global platforms to remove content accessible in the UK — even when that content is lawful and constitutionally protected in the United States. Since internet platforms are global by default, the only practical way to comply is to remove content everywhere. British law thus becomes de facto global law.

This is not hypothetical. Platforms like Gab, Kiwi Farms, and others have already faced pressure, threats, or financial exclusion based on UK regulatory demands. What is emerging is a model of speech laundering: censorship is imposed abroad, then exported into freer jurisdictions via compliance obligations.

Mill warned precisely against this logic. He argued that even when society is confident an opinion is false, suppressing it still harms truth — because truth needs confrontation to remain alive rather than ossified dogma. Britain's system replaces that contest with bureaucratic risk management: speech is judged not by whether it is true or false, but by whether it might make someone uncomfortable, unsafe, or politically unstable.

Mill would have called this not safety but stagnation.

What the United States Should Do

From a Millian, First Amendment standpoint, the United States has both the right and the obligation to resist this.

Not by mirroring Britain's censorship — but by firewalling American speech from foreign regulators entirely.

Several steps follow logically:

1. Pass a Speech Sovereignty Shield Law

Congress should enact legislation barring the enforcement in US courts of any foreign judgment, order, or regulatory demand that conflicts with the First Amendment.

Such a statute should:

Prohibit US platforms from being compelled by foreign regulators to remove constitutionally protected speech.

Create a private right of action allowing American entities to sue foreign regulators or their agents for damages.

Block asset seizures or fines enforced via US intermediaries.

This would mirror existing protections against foreign libel judgments (like the SPEECH Act) — but extended to all constitutionally protected expression.

Mill would approve: freedom of thought must be insulated from external coercion, especially by regimes less committed to intellectual liberty.

2. Judicial Refusal to Recognise Foreign Speech Orders

US courts should formally declare that foreign censorship demands have no legal effect where they conflict with American constitutional standards.

Just as US courts refuse to enforce foreign judgments obtained without due process, they should refuse to enforce judgments obtained through speech standards alien to American law.

This would establish a jurisprudential red line: no foreign government may regulate American speech via extraterritorial pressure.

3. Trade and Diplomatic Countermeasures

Free speech is not merely a civil liberty; it is a national asset. The US could condition technology cooperation, data agreements, or regulatory harmonisation on respect for First Amendment principles.

Britain's model effectively treats American speech as a hazardous export requiring regulation. The US should respond by treating censorship regimes as trade distortions — incompatible with liberal democratic norms.

Mill did not write about trade treaties, but he understood that intellectual liberty is a precondition for civilisational progress. States that erode it undermine not only their own citizens but the global information commons.

Why This Matters Beyond Britain

This conflict is not really about the UK. Britain is simply the most advanced testing ground for a broader trend: bureaucratic speech governance replacing constitutional speech liberty.

Across Europe, Canada, Australia, and increasingly international institutions, speech is being reclassified as a public health risk — something that must be filtered, throttled, flagged, and pre-approved. The governing assumption is not Mill's "let truth fight falsehood," but the opposite: people cannot be trusted to hear bad ideas without being harmed by them.

This is an epistemology of fragility. Mill's was an epistemology of resilience.

Under the fragile model, citizens are children, speech is poison, and regulators are pharmacists. Under Mill's model, citizens are adults, speech is oxygen, and regulators are the danger.

The First Amendment embeds the latter view. Britain has institutionalised the former. The United States must now decide whether it will allow its constitutional culture to be overwritten by foreign bureaucracies through regulatory osmosis.

The Real Stakes

This is not about defending ugly speech for its own sake. Mill never claimed falsehoods are valuable. He claimed that only free contest reveals falsehoods as false. Once speech is suppressed, error becomes unchallengeable dogma, and power replaces reason.

Britain's system assumes regulators can reliably distinguish harmful ideas from legitimate ones. History suggests otherwise. Every censorship regime eventually discovers that "dangerous speech" includes inconvenient speech — dissent, heresy, ridicule, and opposition.

America's constitutional tradition exists precisely to prevent that slide.

The danger today is not overt tyranny, but administrative creep: speech throttled not by jails but by compliance officers, not by police but by payment processors, not by law but by "community standards" quietly shaped by foreign regulators.

Mill would recognise this immediately. The form has changed; the logic has not.

Conclusion: Sovereignty Begins with Speech

If the United States allows foreign governments to dictate what Americans may say online, then the First Amendment becomes a territorial relic — valid only within borders, but void wherever bandwidth flows.

Speech sovereignty is now national sovereignty.

America should not harmonise downward. It should not compromise. It should not negotiate over constitutional liberties as though they were tariff schedules. It should draw a hard legal boundary: foreign censorship stops at the US Constitution.

Mill's argument was simple and remains undefeated:

"He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that."

Britain has chosen a different epistemology — one in which citizens are shielded from dangerous ideas rather than trained to defeat them. The United States should not follow.

Instead, it should do what free societies have always done best:

Let ideas fight.
Let truth win.
Let governments stay out of the way.

https://spectator.com/article/congress-shield-us-foreign-attacks-first-amendment/