Censorship of Westphalia

Brussels

The news.

Now for the explanation.

What this is all about more than anything is preserving the Westphalian paradigm, that government-scale powers, imperatives and methods should always be fundamentally exercised by governments and never by private institutions. (Lessons learned from the Thirty Years War.) Applied here, it means that continental European governments want the sole plenary authority to determine the bounds and grounds of internet censorship, none for the private owners of mainstream social media platforms, even if the latter are the line level enactors of the censorship.

To put it another way, the impetus for this action isn’t that mainstream social media platforms aren’t actually censoring in any ways that differ from or are less frequent than the way that continental European governments desire. It’s all about continental European governments and their agents getting really uneasy and nervous that private actors are the ones calling the shots. The whole ingrained historical memory of this kind of thing leading to a chain reaction of events and circumstances that winds up killing 90% of Magdeburg.

Even though it really doesn’t make a difference as far as we’re concerned. It’s merely the difference between a Gulag and a Goolag.