Foreign hands reach for the American press — again

I spent decades close to the machinery of public information — first setting type by hand, later reorganizing the colonial post so that a letter of news could travel faster and cheaper between Philadelphia and Boston. The lesson I drew from both trades was the same: the freedom of a people depends, in no small part, on who decides what they may read. I confess I did not foresee a printing press that circles the globe in a second, but the political geometry has not changed at all.

Reason reports that the proposed GRANITE Act would make foreign government censorship orders legally unenforceable against American companies operating in the United States. The lead tells us the bill is a direct response to foreign regulators attempting to compel U.S. platforms to suppress content. I do not have the bill's precise language before me, so I will mark what follows as inference rather than confirmed fact — but the logic of the thing is plain enough.

Consider the practical situation: a foreign ministry, displeased with what some American author has published, issues an order to a U.S. company demanding the content be removed globally — not merely within that foreign jurisdiction, but everywhere. If American law is silent on the matter, a company weighing legal risk in a dozen countries may simply comply. The American reader loses access to the work, and the foreign government has exercised censorship on American soil without firing a shot or paying a penny of postage.

This is precisely the kind of quiet encroachment that I think the framers of our constitutional order feared most — not the bold assault on liberty that rallies a people to resist, but the slow administrative erosion that arrives disguised as a routine compliance decision. Paper money badly secured is a slow theft; foreign censorship quietly honored is a slow surrender of the press.

A nation that built its independence partly on the pamphlet and the broadside ought to be jealous of this ground. I would counsel readers to press their senators and representatives to examine the GRANITE Act on its specifics — does it protect the speaker as well as the platform? Does it give a private citizen whose content is suppressed a cause of action? The principle is sound; the mechanism must be scrutinized with equal care. Liberty in the abstract costs nothing to endorse. Liberty in the details is where the real work is done.

The practical counsel: If you create, write, or publish anything on an American platform, you have a direct interest in this legislation. Write your representative. Ask, plainly, whether a foreign government should have the power to make your words disappear from the internet your taxes helped build. That is not a partisan question. It is the oldest American question there is.