There is a sentence near the beginning of Arielle Roth’s remarks to the Media Institute’s Communications Forum luncheon, delivered in Washington on 25 February, that is worth sitting with before we do anything else with it.
“Every major advancement in communications technology has shifted who holds power over speech.”
That’s true. It’s also, for a Trump administration official, a remarkably honest framing of what’s actually at stake in global technology policy. The printing press didn’t just spread ideas — it redistributed the power to propagate them, pulling that power away from the church and the crown and depositing it, unevenly and chaotically, somewhere else.
Radio and television centralised it again. The internet scattered it. And now the question of who controls the infrastructure of the internet — the physical networks, the standards those networks run on, the satellites that bypass terrestrial choke points, the AI systems that increasingly mediate what we see and say — has become the defining political question of our moment.
Roth knows this. That’s what makes the speech interesting. And that’s what makes it worth reading carefully rather than dismissing.
So let’s read it carefully.
The bit she gets right
Roth’s core argument is that communications infrastructure is the new terrain of speech politics. Not the content layer — not what’s posted, what’s moderated, what’s amplified — but the layer beneath: the protocols, the standards bodies, the spectrum allocations, the satellite constellations, the architecture of next-generation networks.
“Today,” she says, “that struggle plays out not only at the edge of the network but deep in the infrastructure layers — in spectrum policy, standards bodies, satellite governance, AI systems, and network architecture.”
Again: correct. This is precisely how power operates in the 21st century communications environment. The people who wrote the TCP/IP protocols shaped the internet more profoundly than any content moderator ever will. The countries that dominate 3GPP — the standards body that defines how mobile networks are built — are making decisions that will echo through global communications for decades. If you control the stack, you control the speech. Not directly, not always visibly, but structurally and persistently.
She extends this to satellite. Whoever can deploy broadband satellites at scale can bypass the terrestrial infrastructure that authoritarian governments use to choke information flows. During the Iran protests, the government shut down the internet. During the early days of the Ukraine war, Starlink kept communications alive in ways that mattered. These are real examples of infrastructure as freedom-supporting technology, and Roth invokes them correctly.
She’s even right about the standards bodies. There are genuine and well-documented efforts by authoritarian states — China in particular, but not exclusively — to push governance models into international technical forums like the ITU that would effectively create a framework for state-controlled internet architecture. The splinternet isn’t a myth. It’s a live geopolitical project, and the standards bodies are a real battlefield.
So here I am, nodding along. A Trump official making a sophisticated infrastructure-as-speech argument, citing real examples of real authoritarianism, identifying a genuinely important strategic challenge. Maybe, you might think, this is one of those moments where the stopped clock is right.
And then she makes the slide.
The slide
It happens fast, and if you’re not watching for it, you might miss it. Having established China and Iran as her primary examples — state censorship, internet shutdowns, the Great Firewall, surveillance built into the architecture of the network — she pivots to what she calls “some of today’s most significant threats.”
These threats, she tells us, “often come from countries that claim to share our democratic values.”
The framing is careful. “Claim to share.” Already we’re being told that the democratic credentials of these countries are dubious that their values are performed rather than genuine. And then she names them.
Europe. The UK. Canada. France.
“In Europe, the Digital Services Act imposes sweeping regulatory regimes backed by crippling penalties that incentivise platforms to remove speech authorities deem ‘harmful’ or ‘misinformation’.”
The UK’s Online Safety Act “includes rules about content safety standards.” Canada “effectively forces American companies to subsidise domestic media and comply with government-directed content mandates.” France, apparently, also features.
And there it is. The move. China and Iran on one side of the ledger; the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Canada on the other. Different in degree, perhaps, the speech allows — but not in kind. All of them, fundamentally, doing the same thing: using control of infrastructure and regulation to control speech.
This is not an accidental equivalence. It is the entire point of the speech.
What the laws actually do
Let’s be honest about the DSA and the Online Safety Act because the best way to refute the false equivalence isn’t to pretend these laws are perfect. They’re not.
The Digital Services Act places obligations on very large online platforms to assess and mitigate systemic risks associated with their services — algorithmic amplification of content that incites violence, the spread of illegal content, threats to electoral integrity. It creates transparency requirements, gives researchers access to data, and establishes an enforcement mechanism. It is bureaucratic, its definitions of harm are contestable, and it will create compliance burdens that some legitimate speech will rub against. These are real concerns.
The Online Safety Act is messier, and one provision deserves to be named directly rather than waved past. Section 121 — the so-called spy clause — gives Ofcom dormant powers to require platforms to use approved scanning technology to detect illegal content, including in private encrypted communications. If exercised, compliance would almost certainly mean breaking end-to-end encryption. Signal, WhatsApp, and others have said publicly they would rather leave the UK market than implement it. Security researchers have described it as technically dangerous. Civil liberties organisations have called it a framework for routine state-sanctioned surveillance. They’re right on all counts. Those powers haven’t been used. They are still in the law, and they shouldn’t be there.
So: the Online Safety Act contains a genuine and serious threat to the privacy of private communications, currently dormant and fiercely contested, built on a justification — child safety — that is real even when the mechanism proposed to address it is wrong. That’s the honest picture.
Now here is what neither law does. Neither law empowers the state to shut down the internet. Neither law creates a government ministry of truth with the power to arrest journalists. Neither embeds surveillance architecture into the physical network infrastructure as a condition of market access. Neither has been used to black out coverage of protests. The Online Safety Act’s worst provisions remain unexercised precisely because democratic accountability — parliamentary scrutiny, legal challenge, platform resistance, press coverage — has so far constrained them.
That accountability is the difference. Not the intentions of the legislators, not the cleanliness of the drafting, but the existence of mechanisms that can push back. The Great Firewall has no such mechanisms. It is the infrastructure.
The DSA and the Online Safety Act are attempts — imperfect, in one case dangerously so — by democratic governments to hold large private platforms accountable for the systemic harms those platforms generate and profit from. You can disagree with the approach. You can argue, with some justification in the OSA’s case, that the cure is worse than the disease. These are legitimate arguments, and people worth reading make them.
What you cannot do, with any intellectual honesty, is put them on the same axis as the Great Firewall.
Roth does it anyway because the purpose of the equivalence isn’t analytical. It’s political. The liberty framing is doing what liberty framings always do in Washington: making a commercial interest sound like a principle.
Starlink super omnia
Which brings us to the freedom beacon.
Roth is effusive about satellite broadband and its capacity to route around authoritarian control. “It breaks the grip of centralised regimes by bypassing terrestrial choke points. When authoritarian governments shut down networks or weaponise local infrastructure to silence speech, satellites can keep information flowing.”
True of satellite technology in general. Whether it is true of the specific satellite infrastructure she has in mind requires a little more scrutiny.
Starlink, Elon Musk’s low-earth-orbit broadband service, is the leading commercial satellite broadband system. It is also owned by a man who has used his control of X in politically contentious ways, whose company complies with some government data requests, and who refused a Ukrainian request to extend Starlink coverage to support an attack in Crimea — a decision that underlined how much power over wartime communications can rest with a single private actor.
The freedom infrastructure of the 21st century, according to the NTIA, is controlled by a single individual with a demonstrated willingness to deploy it as a geopolitical instrument of his personal interests, who has also been a senior official of the government making this argument.
We will leave that there.
The inversion
Here is the thing about Roth’s infrastructure argument: follow it honestly and it describes American power as precisely as it describes Chinese power.
She is right that whoever sets the standards for 6G shapes the speech environment for the next generation of global communications. She is right that control of satellite architecture gives the controlling party leverage over what information flows and where. She is right that AI systems are not neutral, and that whoever builds the dominant AI infrastructure will embed values — about speech, about access, about surveillance — into the global information environment.
She is arguing, on this basis, that the United States must dominate all of these areas. Must lead the standards bodies, must deploy the satellite constellations, must export the AI stack. Must, as she puts it, lead “technically, economically, and philosophically.”
But apply her own analytical framework again. A country that controls the dominant satellite broadband infrastructure has the ability to cut access when it chooses, to surveil communications, to favour some users over others. A country that sets 6G standards embeds its own assumptions about network architecture — about what’s centralised, what’s distributed, what’s observable — into the global infrastructure. A country that exports an “AI-native stack” exports the values of whoever built it.
This is not an argument against American participation in these spaces. It is an observation that American dominance, in the framework Roth has constructed, is structurally identical to the Chinese dominance she is warning against. The difference, she would say, is values. American values. The freest of free expression, the First Amendment, liberty in the architecture.
She says this while serving an administration that has threatened broadcast licence revocations, used regulatory pressure against critical media, fired inspectors general and civil servants who provided independent oversight, and had its owner-adjacent platform systematically adjust its algorithms in ways that benefit the political interests of its owner-adjacent billionaire.
If you are going to make a values argument, you really need the values to be real.
“Philosophically”
Roth’s speech ends with a call to arms. The United States must lead across the full internet stack — not just technically and economically, but philosophically.
The administration that has spent fourteen months demonstrating that it views independent institutions, press freedom, and the rule of law as obstacles rather than foundations wants to export its philosophy. The man who owns the freedom satellite network has spent that same period making plain that free expression means free expression for views he agrees with, and that other expression is subject to adjustment, or veiled suppression.
The infrastructure argument was always going to land here. Because the infrastructure argument, in the hands of any state actor, is ultimately an argument for that state’s dominance. What makes American dominance different from Chinese dominance is not the architecture. It is the values of the people controlling the architecture, and what happens when those values are tested.
We are watching the values being tested in the US in real time. It’s being test by bodies in the streets of Minnesota, by the detention without trial of anyone even suspected of being an illegal immigrant, and by blatant attacks on the separation of powers, the foundation of US democracy.
Roth is right that infrastructure is politics. She’s right that the standards bodies matter, that 6G architecture will shape the speech environment for decades, that satellite broadband has genuine liberatory potential alongside its obvious risks. These are not small insights. The speech would be useful, in another context, from another administration.
But philosophy requires philosophers. And the claim to be defending free expression — globally, structurally, at the level of the stack — requires that the defence be genuine rather than a description of who gets to be in charge.
Whoever controls communications technology controls the boundaries of free expression.
Arielle Roth wrote that. Maybe she should read it again.