US to launch an online portal featuring banned content from around the world

US is developing an online portal that will feature content banned by the government in Europe and other countries. The portal will be hosted in "freedom.gov," according to anonymous sources cited by Reuters. According to the sources familiar with the matter, the portal will also insert a VPN (virtual private network) function that will make the source of the website traffic appear to be generated from the US itself. One source also claimed that the portal will not track user activity.

“Digital freedom is a priority for the State Department, however, and that includes the proliferation of privacy and censorship-circumvention technologies like VPNs," said a US State Department spokesperson.

The portal is not launched yet. The project is being headed by the US State Department undersecretary Sarah Rogers. It was reported that the announcement could have been made at the Munich Security Conference. But later it was delayed, whether it was due to some of the concerns raised by the State Department personnel and lawyers remains unclear.

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The portal could further strain the relationship between the US and its allies, which is already in historic low, following trade disputes, disagreement over US dealings with the Russia-Ukraine conflict and Trump's public display of desire to assert control over Greenland. With the website US will potentially encourage people to flout the local government laws, which will further agitate traditional US allies.

The portal “freedom.gov” was registered on January 12. It features no content but shows the National Design Studio's logo, the words "fly, eagle, fly", and a log-in form. It is unclear how the portal will be different from any commercial VPN.

The European Union defends free speech, only excluding content that promotes “hate-speech” or extremist right-wing propaganda that fueled Nazism, including its vilification of Jews, foreigners and minorities, with the EU's Digital Services Act and Britain's Online Safety Act. It had been one of the reason of conflict between the EU and the US Silicon Valley giants like Musk, Zuckerberg and Thiel. The US has mentioned that the European Union is facing a "civilisational erasure" due to its migration policies, and it had planned to actively cultivate resistance to Europe's current trajectory.

The world order is changing, and digital governance is emerging. At the moment, there are three types of digital habituses, US market-first model, the EU human-centric regulatory model and the Russia-China authoritarian digital sovereignty model. The current face-off seems like a confrontation between EU-regulators, old guards and the US tech giants, new money disruptors. The European Union is campaigning for a unified Digital ID framework, which has faced massive pushback from the civil liberties group. While the authorities are marketing it as human-centric, civil liberties groups are denouncing it as "bureau-centric".