Earlier this evening, my learned friend Jonathan Hall KC, the UK’s Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, had this to say about the escalating row between the United States and Europe/UK over who gets to write the rules of the road for the Internet:

Downranking and visa withdrawal? As the EU DSA/ UK Online Safety Act/ putative US GRANITE Act scrap plays out, and we debate the merits of speech regulation from our own different traditions, will censorship creep in as a weapon in the debate? I hope not.

— Independent Reviewer (@terrorwatchdog) December 7, 2025

As many of my regular readers will know, I have been in an approximately 11-month battle to keep the UK’s telecommunications regulator, the Office of Communications or “Ofcom,” off the grass here in the United States. Since August I have been joined by my co-counsel Ron Coleman in our client 4chan’s case against Ofcom in the D.D.C. For the most part, for most of 2025, this fight has been a niche issue only focused on by highly technical policy elites on both sides of the pond – people who deal with cross-border censorship and mutual legal assistance issues for a living.

The European Commission’s decision to fine X EUR 120 million on Friday dragged that discussion into the spotlight of mainstream U.S. political discourse. The news was a political earthquake:

Rumors swirling that the EU commission will fine X hundreds of millions of dollars for not engaging in censorship. The EU should be supporting free speech not attacking American companies over garbage.

— JD Vance (@JDVance) December 4, 2025

The issue is that what the E.U. frames as a “transparency” or “consumer protection” intervention – which it may well be under European free speech jurisprudence – falls squarely within the boundaries of constitutionally protected speech in the United States under American free speech jurisprudence. The EU specifically complains about (a) the blue check mark and (b) X’s refusal to allow “researchers” – read, critics affiliated with academic institutions – access to its data, presumably for the purpose of writing hit pieces on X and calling for more censorship regulations on that platform.

The EU gravely miscalculated its timing. If I had to guess about the rationale for its decision, and specifically its timing, the EU likely thought that the United States had not formed a view on laws like the Digital Services Act or Online Safety Act and that a December fine decision would not leave enough time on Congress’ legislative calendar to agree a response, and deploy that response, before the mid-terms.

The only problem with this is, that the United States started its legislative response to foreign censorship practically as soon as President Trump entered office, holding hearings as early as February. I am not going to say what I know about that process, but I have publicly stated on many occasions that as soon as UK Ofcom sent a notice to me, that notice landed in a government inbox same-day.

This has been happening quietly since late Q1. We now have let the world know, through a range of public disclosures, that any future UK enforcement inbound will be published and sent to our government as soon as it is received.

I of course know nothing about any federal process. I am a simple country lawyer from Connecticut and anything to the west of the Hudson River does not exist in my simple, rural, hokey worldview; I could not even find D.C. on a map. I hear dragons and other such mystical beasts live there. What I will say is that my hunch is that the United States federal government is rather farther along in its policymaking process than the Europeans expected.

So when the EU fined X on Friday, December 5th, it was like tossing a match onto a pile of fireworks assembled for America’s upcoming 250th birthday in six months’ time. Kaboom.

The Brits were the first to learn this, on December 4th, when Sarah Rogers, the United States Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, dropped a grenade on GB News, in London, confirming that the United States House of Representatives is considering introducing a federal version of the GRANITE Act, a bill that I first proposed in mid-October which Deputy Secretary of State Colin Crossman converted into a now-filed bill in the State of Wyoming. The Wyoming bill that has been publicly posted is v3; the text has been extensively updated since, and there will be amendments in the bill which appears publicly on the Wyoming legislature’s website shortly.

New Hampshire is also, slowly but surely, advancing a parallel effort.

Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt, a long-time free speech defender in our legislature’s upper chamber, confirmed that he, too, is working on legislation of his own on this theme in the Senate:

Foreign bureaucrats have zero right to tell Americans what they can and can’t say.

The European Commission’s attempt to censor American speech is a fundamental attack on our sovereignty.

I’m working on legislation to protect American speech from foreign subversion. Stay tuned. https://t.co/2vv4N36dEY

— Eric Schmitt (@Eric_Schmitt) December 5, 2025

Of course, we’re not done fighting here – not yet. We need a bill and it needs to be enacted. Everything will depend on the content of the final bill Congress actually proposes, and, having not seen that bill, I have absolutely no clue what Congress intends to do. I’m just a simple country lawyer, as I said.

I am hoping the fact that they borrowed the name “GRANITE” is a useful hint. But even without seeing the bill text, it seems clear to me that the Executive Branch and both Houses of Congress seem fairly aligned on the question of whether foreign censorship is a major strategic concern for the United States, and fairly aligned on the proposition that it needs to stop.

Under Secretary Rogers’ announcement last Wednesday that the GRANITE Act was under consideration by the House came to me as a complete (and very pleasant) surprise – it’s not often that a blog post gets converted into a federal bill and then publicly named by the State Department in under sixty days – and I hope like hell the U.S. government can see it through and get something substantially similar to what Colin wrote for Wyoming over the line as quickly as possible.

The question every tech lawyer in the North Atlantic Treaty zone is asking themselves today, of course, is, “what the fuck happens next if this thing passes?” As the originator of the idea and one of the co-authors of the Wyoming bill (although primary drafting credit for the state bill text belongs to Colin, who has been working on it furiously for the last three weeks), I feel that now might be the time to chime in to this discussion in something longer than tweet-format.

I agree with Jonathan Hall KC that individual sanctions targeting politicians and individual civil servants is not the way to go. That’s why I proposed GRANITE the way I did, and why the bill form of GRANITE is written the way it is. I have lots of friends in England. Some of them work for the government. Some of them are even reasonably senior in the civil service. Just because Parliament is currently full of jackasses doesn’t mean that everyone who works for the state is also a jackass.

One of the merits of the GRANITE proposal is that it is not punitive – not out of the gate. GRANITE draws a red line around what the United States regards as its sovereign domain on the Internet, in accordance with domestic law. It provides a penalty for crossing into that sovereign zone.

GRANITE would not, on the day it is enacted, turn its sights on the Europeans or the UK – we don’t do *ex post facto *law in the United States, so anything that’s happened to date between the European Commission/Ofcom and American citizens is, legally speaking, going to be water under the bridge. GRANITE draws a line in the sand, and the “civil damages turbolaser” it creates will not activate unless and until a foreign sovereign crosses that line.

The idea for GRANITE was inspired by two things:

• First, existing law in the United States. There are precedents in the U.S. for GRANITE-like tools to protect Americans from sovereign power being used to intrude on their civil rights. See 18 U.S.C. § 242 – deprivation of civil rights under color of law. The Wyoming GRANITE Act essentially places European governments on the same footing as the US government itself, albeit with greater deterrent effect; and
• Second, historical cases where the courts prove to be an inadequate or faulty remedy to the problem at hand, so, after illustrating the nature of the fault in litigation, the legislature is convinced to move off the plate and activates. This is one of the reasons, although not the only reason, we sued Ofcom in the D.D.C.; although we will be responding to their motion to dismiss in due course, and I will reserve comment on their motion and our answer for now (you can wait until the docket is updated), I can say that the motion to dismiss on sovereign immunity grounds was expected, and I strongly suspect their filing had a political impact in Washington. A similar example in a free speech context was the Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy case and its impact in the creation of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. For my English colleagues, a similar case in your history was Burmah Oil v. Lord-Advocate.

Litigation illustrated the nature of the problem. Hopefully, legislation will fix it.

Assuming arguendo that GRANITE is enacted in substantially similar form to the Wyoming bill, the practical effect will be that DSA/OSA inbound to the United States will cease. Levels of moralistic, righteous anger in Europe would be extreme. But I don’t think anyone will try to get through the shield.

Even if we get GRANITE, I still expect larger platforms with global footprints to largely comply with European local laws – voluntarily. If we get a full-fat GRANITE from Congress, Europe and the UK will not like it. They will kick and scream. They will say America is responding to their overreach with overreach of our own, to which my answer is: too bad.

The UK chose to pick on little, US-only platforms with no UK presence. It became necessary to protect them and a shield like GRANITE is the only thing that will accomplish that objective.

In terms of what lies ahead for the relationship between our two continents, my preference would be a future where Europe and the US acknowledge our differences, or, even better, where Europe changes course from its current censorial ambitions and embraces free speech once more.

I do not expect lucrative GRANITE practices to spring up at major law firms. The damages under GRANITE are so punitive, and the deck so heavily stacked in favor of the American plaintiff (much as the EU censorship deck is presently stacked in favor of the EU regulators), that I don’t expect many GRANITE cases because, bluntly, I don’t think Europe has the stomach for that kind of fight.

Here’s an obligatory pepe meme for my government readers:

In order for a shield law to really work, a censorship order has to be so destructive to the foreign entity sending it, that a regulatory investigation of an American platform for protected speech is politically suicidal, cannot result in a political victory, and therefore must not ever begin.

One commentator on X referred to GRANITE as a “legal atomic bomb.” I think that description is apt, and suggestive of what will emerge after such a law’s enactment – a state of affairs I would describe as an “Online Censorship Cold War.” The larger the EU makes their penalties, or the bigger and more strategically important a U.S. target they pursue (considering that maximum penalties are calculated by reference to a percentage of the target’s worldwide turnover), the greater are the statutory civil damages recoverable in American courts. GRANITE is a system of mutually assured destruction, a “dead hand” device, that will be so fearsome in its consequences that no one will dare risk setting it off.

This is far better than the status quo, which is that Europe can hit America, but America, due to self-imposed restraints, largely can’t hit back. The “Cold War” scenario means the EU can pretend it can project its sovereignty abroad, but explain away a lack of enforcement action against Americans by saying that it’s impractical, because we’re so damned unreasonable. That’s a politically sellable answer in Europe that allows us to go back to the way the Internet functioned, say, three years ago. They can moralize in peace, we can build in peace.

Where next? Well, it’s back to Public International Law 101 basics, I’m afraid. No more purporting to send e-mails with extraterritorial effect, no more pretending that EU and UK rules apply on US soil. Europe and the UK will need to negotiate MLAs and cooperation agreements and agree to respect U.S. judicial process and related rights if they want Americans’ cooperation in the future. Brute-forcing domestic law on us won’t work.

I think after new management is in power in the UK, the UK might want to adopt something like GRANITE to protect its own companies from EU DSA fines.

I’d be happy to consult with any government, including Labour if they decided to actually adopt a sane tech and economic policy and changed tack, on how to do this under English law.

If enacted in America, I predict that GRANITE will prove a viable strategy for the United States to protect its domestic industry. The UK could, at some future date, adopt similar rules to protect its homegrown tech companies from EU DSA fines.

This would require the UK to take a radically different approach towards Internet regulation. But the GRANITE model can be replicated elsewhere. I hope we enact it here, and I hope the UK pivots to a more free-speech-oriented future and copies the model we designed.