The Slippery Slope of State-by-State Internet Censorship
The Supreme Court’s recent 6-3 decision allowing states to limit access to online pornography has been rattling around in my head for days now. What started as discussions about “protecting children” has quickly revealed itself to be something far more concerning - the systematic dismantling of internet freedom, one state at a time.
The predictable partisan split on the court tells us everything we need to know about how politicised the highest judicial body in America has become. When someone pointed out the irony of certain justices’ own histories with pornography, it perfectly encapsulated the hypocrisy at play here. We’re seeing “rules for thee, but not for me” written into constitutional law.
What really gets under my skin is how these laws are crafted with deliberate loopholes. The exemptions for search engines and social media platforms while targeting specific adult sites isn’t about child protection - it’s about picking winners and losers in the digital economy. Big Tech gets a free pass while smaller content creators and foreign competitors get hammered with impossible compliance burdens.
The technical absurdity is staggering. Young people today might not be as tech-savvy as previous generations in some ways, but they’re still clever enough to find workarounds. VPNs, proxy servers, cached content - the internet routes around censorship like water flowing around rocks. Meanwhile, platforms will twist themselves into pretzels trying to fit arbitrary legal definitions, creating worse user experiences for everyone.
But here’s what really worries me: this isn’t about pornography at all. Reading through Project 2025 makes it crystal clear that this is step one in a broader campaign to redefine what constitutes “pornography” or “obscene content.” Today it’s adult websites. Tomorrow it’s any book, film, or TV show featuring LGBTQ+ characters. They’re literally planning to classify “transgender ideology” as pornography and treat educators who discuss it as sex offenders.
Living in Australia, we’ve had our own battles with internet censorship - remember the great firewall debates under Conroy? But watching America tear itself apart over these culture wars while creating a patchwork of state-by-state internet restrictions feels like witnessing the balkanisation of the web in real time. Soon we might need a map just to know which websites we can access depending on which state’s laws apply.
The enforcement mechanisms being proposed are downright Orwellian. Biometric verification systems, central ID databases, massive fines for compliance failures - all in the name of protecting children from content they’ll access anyway through increasingly sketchy channels. Meanwhile, the real predators will simply move to darker corners of the internet where there’s even less oversight.
What frustrates me most is how this undermines the very principles America claims to champion. The country that gave us the First Amendment and positioned itself as the beacon of free speech is systematically dismantling those freedoms. Conservative voters who spent decades railing against government overreach are now cheering as that same government decides what adults can access online.
The tech industry’s response has been predictably self-serving. The big players carved out exemptions for themselves while smaller competitors get crushed under compliance costs. It’s regulatory capture disguised as moral legislation, and it’s working exactly as intended.
Perhaps the most insidious aspect is how this creates a two-tiered internet. Those with technical knowledge and resources - VPN subscriptions, offshore hosting, cryptocurrency payments - will maintain access to whatever content they want. Meanwhile, less tech-savvy users, often from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, will find themselves increasingly locked out of legal content behind geographical and bureaucratic barriers.
The international implications are equally troubling. Foreign content providers are getting a massive competitive advantage as domestic platforms struggle with compliance costs. We’re essentially exporting our culture wars while importing our entertainment, weakening American digital sovereignty in the process.
Despite my frustration with this backwards slide into digital authoritarianism, I’m not ready to give up hope entirely. Technology has always been a double-edged sword, and the same innovations being used to restrict access can also be used to preserve it. Decentralised platforms, encrypted communications, and peer-to-peer networks offer paths around these restrictions.
More importantly, this overreach might finally wake people up to what’s really at stake. When conservative states start blocking access to mainstream entertainment because it features gay characters, or when liberal states retaliate by restricting access to conservative news sources, the absurdity of state-by-state internet censorship will become impossible to ignore.
The internet was supposed to be humanity’s great democratising force - a place where information flowed freely across borders and artificial barriers. Watching it get carved up by politicians scoring cheap points in culture wars feels like watching the future get cancelled in real time. But the internet is resilient, and so are the people who built it. This fight is far from over.