At this year’s Munich Security Conference, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen stressed Europe’s “long tradition in freedom of speech.” Then she drew a redline. “We are very clear with digital sovereignty . . . that what is forbidden offline is forbidden online,” she added.

Von der Leyen’s maxim would have sounded foreign to the continent’s leaders just over a decade ago. Inspired by the social media–led movements of the Arab Spring, liberal democracies treated Internet freedom as a geopolitical principle to be evangelized rather than a problem to be regulated. Since then, faith in the liberalizing potential of open access to the Internet has given way to a more technocratic focus on digital sovereignty, the idea that states must control their own data and infrastructure, as the organizing principle of European digital policy. The pivot has come as a response to the increasing dominance of American tech platforms, whose engagement-driven models have driven fears that they might be weaponized by hostile states and groups to spread propaganda and undermine democratic institutions. Since U.S. President Donald Trump’s reelection in 2024—and as Silicon Valley’s leaders have cozied up to an administration openly antagonistic toward Europe’s political establishment and supportive of the populists challenging it—European policymakers have increasingly felt the need to assert control over what Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has referred to as a “digital Wild West.”

Europe has already committed to scaling its own technological capacity and reducing dependence on the U.S. tech stack through measures such as the European Chips Act, which aims to boost semiconductor production, and projects such as Gaia-X, a cloud infrastructure initiative designed to facilitate secure data transfers. But the continent’s adoption of digital sovereignty now extends well beyond industrial policy and critical infrastructure. Digital sovereignty has come to encompass the governance of speech, as governments push social media platforms to police online expression vaguely classified as disinformation, foreign manipulation, hate speech, or child exploitation.

In the name of safeguarding democracy, open societies are importing the policies of authoritarian regimes they rightly identify as enemies of free expression. The European Union and its member states have embraced top-down content controls. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has expanded its own surveillance, ideological screening, and pressure on tech platforms. It is not too late to reclaim the open Internet’s promise of uninhibited access to information across borders. But this requires making a distinction between holding tech platforms accountable and imposing state censorship—and decisively rejecting the latter while encouraging platform design that ensures the former.

A DIGITAL DREAM DEFERRED

In July 2012, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) unanimously adopted a landmark resolution affirming a simple proposition: “The same rights that people have offline must also be protected online, in particular freedom of expression, which is applicable regardless of frontiers and through any media of one’s choice.” Writing in The New York Times, Carl Bildt, Sweden’s foreign minister, hailed the vote as a “breakthrough of fundamental importance,” insisting that “the free flow of information on the Internet is a global call and not something pushed only by a few Western states.” For a brief moment, it seemed as if the world’s democracies had accepted that the open Internet would be the nervous system of modern liberty.

But even at this crowning moment of techno-optimism, that idea was already facing challenges. After pro-democracy activists in Russia used social media to coordinate mass protests against fraudulent legislative elections in 2011 and the presidential election in 2012, the Kremlin treated online dissent as a national security threat. The Federal Security Service, or FSB, accused Russian bloggers and American social networks of disseminating Western calls for “overthrowing the established political regime.” The same month that the UNHRC resolution was approved, the Duma passed what was nominally a child protection law that in practice created a sweeping national blacklist authorizing the media regulator Roskomnadzor to block without a court order any sites deemed to be promoting........

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