No step on snek that's stepping on other snek.

Any freedom can be viewed in one of two ways:

- A set of boundaries that sovereign states are required to respect (Congress shall make no law), or...

- A set of competing interests that have to be balanced in order to maximize the desired freedom for the maximum number of people (your right to swing your fist ends where my face begins).

The US codified the former in its constitution, because the formation of the current US government was a struggle between the people who found the prior Articles of Confederation to be unworkable[0] and the people who didn't want to build British Empire 2: Electric Boogaloo. The compromise was that we'd codify very obvious things the government was not allowed to do based on what horribly unpopular things the British did to the colonies. This is why we have a strong constitutional prohibition against being forced to quarter soldiers in one's home, even though you rarely see it get used in court. This as applied to freedom of speech is the 1st Amendment, which covers basically every way that the right of freedom of speech had been curtailed in Britain up to that point[1].

However, because we have this very strong prohibition on the government restricting speech, people have misinterpreted it to mean that only the government can restrict speech. That is, if Comcast refuses to let you watch Netflix unless they get paid more for the traffic, that's Comcast's protected speech, and any government regulation to unblock Netflix is censorship. Or, alternatively, if someone decides to publish your personal information in response to a video you don't like, the resulting mob justice against you isn't censorship because it's not the right person holding the gun, and taking down your personal information would be censoring the person who published it.

This is, of course, absurd. But the US has exported and normalized this thinking beyond the narrow realm of constitutional law scholars. Right-wingers were able to successfully appropriate 'free speech' to mean 'turn every website into 4chan', and in response, liberals made the mistake of adopting the Comcast Argument I listed above. This is how we got arguments like "Twitter and Facebook can't censor because it's a private platform", even though it's a monopoly. Now that Musk owns Twitter and boosts the far-right in exchange for them protecting Musk's fragile ego, I fully expect this calculus to flip and you'll see right-wingers go back to the Comcast Argument while liberals call for regulation.

The EU's tech regulations would be condemned by the same logic. i.e. the EU should not be allowed to regulate big tech, because only sovereigns can censor, and censorship is so bad that we should not even censor the people engaged in censorship[2]. The boundaries argument ends up with a nominal right to free speech that is defacto privatized censorship, which is a problem the balancing argument does not have.

[0] for reasons largely similar to the problems the EU faces being an international union rather than a federal state

[1] I would also argue that it is a de-facto ban on "culture war issues", given that religion and wars over minor church schisms were the European culture war of the 1700s.

[2] https://alphahistory.com/nazigermany/goebbels-on-the-reichst...