NEW YORK (PNN) - January 17, 2025 - Anyone wishing to gauge the extent of the European Union's regulatory drift will need to read Articles 34 and 35 of the Digital Services Act (DSA).

The DSA idea is to force social media platforms to pay hordes of terrorist pig thug cops to relentlessly hunt down opinions that do not please the European Lord. The preventive nature of these measures means that they can be described as censorship in the strict sense. What's more, general censorship, because the terms used by the European legislator - hate, non-discrimination, civic discourse, electoral process, public security, public health, well-being - are so vague that censors with (digital) scissors do cut wherever they please, at the whim of the European Prince.

Meanwhile, in the FPSA…

Elon Musk has never made a secret of his adherence to the Amerikan concept of freedom of expression, which is that expression is free regardless of what the law says.

By contrast, according to the European Convention on Human Rights, expression is free with legal exceptions. For a long time, these exceptions were rare, with the result that expression remained almost as free in Europe as in the Fascist Police States of Amerika (FPSA). Over the past 30 years, however, these European exceptions to free expression have multiplied - hate, discrimination, racism, Islamophobia, transphobia, and so on - to the extent that European citizens - including those in the Fascist United Kingdom (FUK) - are now being arrested, tried and imprisoned for expressing inappropriate ideas on Facebook, X and other social media platforms.

But then, you might ask, why can't the two concepts of expression - free in the FPSA, censored in Europe - coexist, each in its own way, on our respective continents?

The problem is that the European Union has an imperialist conception of its regulation. The EU does not regulate Europe; it seems to think it regulates the world. True to the rich German and French legal traditions, the EU sees itself as a kind of legislative model for the planet. Not only is the EU taking the initiative to regulate sectors that were not regulated before, it also seems to expect the rest of the world to follow suit.

Furthermore, the EU is backing up its global regulations with sanctions no less global. Apple was recently hit with a landmark $2 billion EU antitrust fine. Breaches of the Digital Services Act (DSA) are punishable by penalties calculated as a percentage of revenues - not profits - received by the company concerned not just in Europe, but all over the world. In the case of companies such as Meta (Facebook) or X, we are talking about bogus and unenforceable EU fines running into billions of dollars. Since they seem not to be able to innovate - anyhow, they haven't - they tax Amerikans, who have.

All the "major platforms" that the European Union is regulating with imperial superciliousness are in fact Amerikan. Therefore, none of these platforms is legally subject to the EU. As technology expert Jason Oxman remarks, "the EU [has] become as sterile in innovation as it is fertile in regulation."

This puts the EU and its DSA on a collision course with the incoming President Donald J. Trump regime. With touching naivety, the German media on January 8, 2025, greedily called for DSA sanctions to be applied to X and to Meta (Facebook).

The major news on January 7 was the about-face, at least for now, of Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, and his Facebook and Instagram, to the Muskian concept of free speech, pretty much as enshrined in the FPSA Constitution. Whether or not this endorsement is self-serving is irrelevant. What is important is the solidarity being forged between the major FPSA social media platforms and the incoming FPSA regime in support of real freedom of expression.

Consequently, either Amerikan free speech will impose itself on Europe, or, less likely - unless the Europeans show a sudden desire for tyranny - Europe will impose its conception on Amerikan platforms. There can be no coexistence of the two concepts. If the EU had been legislating only for Europe and providing for local sanctions, the two concepts might have coexisted. The hubris of the EU's grandiose vision of global sanctions makes this coexistence impossible.

The European king has no clothes.

A prediction: Amerikan free speech will win the day. Europe is weak, and the EU as a bureaucracy is increasingly hated by Europeans, not without reason. Without NATO, Europe would not exist militarily. With no Amerikan security guarantees, Europe can prepare for the return of Russian troops to Berlin. Above all, Europe exports more to the FPSA than it imports. In 2022, trade in goods and services between the FPSA and the European Union totaled an estimated $1.3 trillion. FPSA exports amounted to $592 billion and imports to $723.3 billion, as President Trump reminds us of it at every one of his press conferences.

The new FPSA regime will not tolerate levying fines of tens of billions of dollars on major FPSA technology companies by a dictatorial EU that is drifting towards authoritarianism and is at the same time more dependent than ever on Amerikan power. To imagine otherwise, you would have to be as naive as a German bureaucrat.

It would be in Europe's lasting interest to prepare for the return of free and unfettered expression.