freedom.gov is a US State Department project launched in January 2026 under the Trump administration. Its stated purpose is to help citizens in countries with restrictive internet laws access the web freely. Its website currently shows a Paul Revere image with the words: “Freedom is coming. Information is power. Reclaim your human right to free expression. Get ready.” It uses a VPN-like mechanism that routes European users’ traffic through US servers, making their activity invisible to tracking, logging no IP addresses or browsing history.
The tool was built for authoritarian states – think China, Iran, Russia – the kind of places the US State Department traditionally worries about. But Sarah Rogers, the US Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, has confirmed the site has been “inundated” with British users – and that a clear majority of the traffic is coming from the UK. British people, living in a NATO ally and close trading partner of the United States, are using a US government censorship circumvention tool to bypass their own country’s laws.
This is a fairly pointed indicator about how the Trump administration views the UK’s Online Safety Act.
What The Online Safety Act Actually Does
The UK’s Online Safety Act came fully into force in stages during 2025, with illegal content duties applying from March and child safety duties from July.
Platforms are required to remove illegal content, protect children from harmful material including pornography, self-harm content, eating disorder promotion and bullying, implement age assurance and report compliance failures to Ofcom. Non-compliance carries fines of up to £18 million or 10% of global revenue.
The US State Department’s view of these requirements is unambiguous. Officials have described the OSA as “worse than Iran” and characterised it as Orwellian overreach. The specific concerns are threefold: the Act’s ambiguous content categories, which the Trump administration argues will inevitably restrict adult content well beyond what’s intended for children; the UK Home Office’s demands for encryption backdoors to access cloud content globally; and the OSA’s enforcement funding model, which levies around £70 million from Meta, Google, Microsoft, Apple and TikTok – a charge Republicans describe as an extraterritorial tax grab on American companies.
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The EU Is In The Same Conversation
The Online Safety Act is merely one of several EU frameworks sparking major debate in the U.S.
The EU’s Digital Services Act, which regulates very large platforms through a combination of transparency requirements, user rights and complaint systems, has also come under sharp criticism. X was fined €120 million for DSA non-compliance in December 2025. Germany issued 482 removal orders in 2024, leading to the removal of 16,771 pieces of content. Senator Anna Paulina Luna went as far as threatening to sanction the UK Prime Minister and Britain itself if Labour banned X, placing the UK rhetorically in the same category as China, Iran and Russia.
The two European frameworks differ in ways that matter for compliance. The OSA is content-based – it specifies categories of material that must be removed and gives ministers powers to mandate “accredited technology”, which critics argue could erode encryption. The DSA is process-based – focused on platform transparency, user rights and accountability mechanisms rather than mandating specific content outcomes.
The US administration’s criticism covers both, but the encryption and content mandates in the OSA attract the sharpest language.
Navigating The Shift
Google and Elon Musk are warning that the UK’s Online Safety Act imposes compliance burdens so severe that digital platforms could abandon the country entirely. The fact that tech giants with the deepest resources to adapt or fight the rules are making this threat speaks volumes. The question for UK founders building products subject to the OSA – content platforms, community tools, anything with user-generated content – is more granular and more urgent.
Compliance costs are the most immediate argument. Building age assurance, content moderation systems and Ofcom reporting infrastructure into a product from scratch is expensive, and the requirements hold true regardless of the scale.
The OSA’s drafters may not have fully accounted for this when building for safety at the Meta and Google tier. The debate concerning regulatory divergence focuses on the distant future. The US government is now actively helping British users circumvent UK law. That creates an asymmetry: UK platforms are required to comply with the OSA, while US-based tools give UK users routes around it – that’s not a stable regulatory equilibrium.
Sarah Rogers put the American stance clearly: “It’s no coincidence. America, our roots are in Britain, the roots of our common law are in Britain. We have more in common with these people than divides us. Just because government and key sectors of civil society are hostile to freedom of speech doesn’t mean the people are.”
That remark by the US Under Secretary of State to Britain is a classic diplomatic prelude to a tougher conversation.
