Tens of millions of people face the loss of an internet service they use to consume information from around the world. Their government says the block is for their own good, necessitated by threats to national security. The internet service is dangerous, they say, a tool of foreign meddling and a menace to the national fabric — though they furnish little evidence. A situation like this, historically, is the kind of thing the U.S. government protests in clear terms.

When asked, for instance, about Chinese censorship of Twitter in 2009, President Barack Obama was unequivocal. “I can tell you that in the United States, the fact that we have free Internet — or unrestricted Internet access — is a source of strength, and I think should be encouraged.” When the government of Nigeria disconnected its people from Twitter in 2021, the State Department blasted the move, with spokesperson Ned Price declaring, “Unduly restricting the ability of Nigerians to report, gather, and disseminate opinions and information has no place in a democracy.”

But with the Supreme Court approving on Friday a law that would shut off access to TikTok, the U.S. is poised to conduct the exact kind of internet authoritarianism it has spent decades warning the rest of the world about.

Since the advent of the global web, this has been the standard line from the White House, State Department, Congress, and an infinitude of think tanks and NGOs: The internet is a democracy machine. You turn it loose, and it generates freedom ex nihilo. The more internet you have, the more freedom you have.

The State Department in particular seldom misses an opportunity to knock China, Iran, and other faraway governments for blocking their people from reaching the global communications grid — moves justified by those governments as necessary for national safety.

In 2006, the State Department presented the Bush administration’s Global Internet Freedom strategy of “defending Internet freedom by advocating the availability of the widest possible universe of content.” In a 2010 speech, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton cautioned that “countries that restrict free access to information or violate the basic rights of internet users risk walling themselves off from the progress of the next century.” She emphasized that the department sought to encourage........

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