The U.S. presents itself as the guardian of a “free and open internet.” But behind the rhetoric lies a deeper conflict over who controls the global architecture of communication — and who gets to speak in the world being formed.
By Prince Kapone | Weaponized Information | November 7, 2025
Trojan Warnings from the Gatekeepers of Empire
On November 5, 2025, The Hill ran an opinion piece by John Yoo and Ivana Stradner warning that a new U.N. cybercrime convention—shepherded by Russia and China—will smuggle authoritarianism into global law while the United States stands as the last true guardian of a “free and open internet.” The pitch is simple and cinematic: villains at the gate, a naïve U.N., and Washington forced to choose between capitulation and courage. Their prescription is even simpler: reject the treaty and rally the world around the Budapest Convention, held up as the gold standard.
Step back and look at the messengers. John Yoo is the Beltway’s lawyer for unlimited executive prerogative—the jurisprudence of the blank check—whose career has normalized the idea that “security” legitimates almost any state action in the shadows. Ivana Stradner works in the think-tank ecosystem that treats information policy as a battlefield doctrine and public debate as a terrain to be shaped. Together they speak fluent Washington: a language that recasts surveillance as “defense,” treats corporate platforms as neutral commons, and declares any non-U.S. standard a threat to liberty by definition.
Now consider the outlet. The Hill is Beltway infrastructure, not a town square. It is where elite narratives are formatted for policymakers, staffers, and the consultant class—where sponsored common sense becomes tomorrow’s talking points. When a line appears there, it is not simply an opinion; it is a rehearsal, a test balloon, a signal flare to the apparatus that manufactures consensus.
The piece moves with familiar choreography. First, it frames the U.N. process as a “Trojan horse,” implying deception so total that deliberation itself is suspect. Second, it cleanses U.S. digital power of its history by treating state-platform fusion as a foreign pathology rather than a transnational business model born in the imperial core. Third, it moralizes geopolitics: Russia and China are essential characters—shadowy, monolithic, civilizational—while the U.S. is cast as a reluctant sheriff who hates to police but must. Fourth, it invokes civil liberties as a shield against international cooperation, not against state overreach; “rights” become a rhetorical border wall around U.S. jurisdiction. Finally, it crowns the Budapest Convention as a neutral referee, omitting the asymmetries that make “cooperation” look very different depending on which side of the data cables you live on.
The emotional engine is crisis rhetoric. Words like “relentless,” “authoritarian,” and “grave risks” stack up to trigger fight-or-flight. The reader is ushered from anxiety to certainty without ever pausing in the hard middle—what exactly is in the text, who gains operational authority, how cross-border requests work, whose servers are subpoenaed, which communities get raided when “cybercrime” is defined expansively. Fear becomes policy by other means.
Notice the omissions the argument depends on. It gestures toward censorship abroad while treating domestic policing of speech as either virtuous or invisible. It laments the specter of political repression while naturalizing economic coercion—the sanctions, seizures, and infrastructural choke points that pre-structure the “freedom” of the network. It reduces a worldwide dispute over data governance, jurisdiction, and sovereignty to a morality play where technology is neutral, capital is absent, and the only danger is the wrong flag flying over the server farm.
Behind the bylines stand the amplifiers: the think-tank circuit that feeds panels, briefings, and op-eds into a single megaphone, the defense-tech lobby that needs permanent insecurity to justify permanent budgets, and the platform monopolies that prefer any treaty which protects their home-field advantage and immunizes their extraction layers from foreign law. This is not a conspiracy; it is a supply chain. Narrative inputs go in, policy outputs come out, and along the belt the public is told that their privacy is safest when the world remains wired through Washington.
Read this piece as a specimen, not a scandal. Its craft is professional: a careful blend of legal cadence and geopolitical melodrama. Its function is disciplinary: to make skepticism toward a multipolar internet feel like common sense. And its wager is clear: if you accept that “security” is whatever the hegemon says it is, you will accept that any alternative standard is tyranny. Our task in the next sections is not to trade melodrama for counter-melodrama, but to excavate the record the op-ed avoids: the architecture of surveillance, the economics of data power, the politics of jurisdiction, and the material stakes for the world’s majority. Only then can we speak plainly about freedom on the internet—and who gets to define it.
What the Record Actually Shows
Let’s strip this down to the studs. First, the claims inside the op-ed that check out in the public record. The U.N. did adopt a new cybercrime treaty in December 2024, and Russia and China were central in the drafting. The earlier playbook on this terrain is the Budapest Convention, long championed by Washington and Brussels. Both Russia and China run national control architectures over the network—Russia’s RuNet and China’s Golden Shield. In 2022, Moscow passed laws that criminalized anti-war speech online. The Cybersecurity Tech Accord—a big tent of tech and security firms—flagged the U.N. treaty as risky for rights and commerce. And yes, U.S. officials raised human-rights concerns in public. That’s the face of the story the op-ed wants you to see: all technically true, all carefully curated.
Now the part that gets left in the shadows. The internet wasn’t born as a neutral global commons or a Silicon Valley lemonade stand. It was built under the Pentagon. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) stood up ARPANET in the late 1960s as a distributed communications system with military priorities. You don’t have to take anyone’s word for it: it’s laid out in the National Science Foundation’s history and DARPA’s own project timeline. The civilian web you tap on your phone sits atop that foundation. If you erase that origin, Washington’s enduring leverage over the network looks like an accident instead of design.
A second silence: scale and reach of U.S. surveillance. In 2013, reporters at The Guardian and elsewhere published documents showing the National Security Agency taps global communications using systems like PRISM, XKeyscore, and Upstream—moving through telecom backbones and the very platforms people use every day. This isn’t a side note; it’s the plumbing of the world we live in.
The Budapest Convention, which the op-ed holds up as the gold standard, also carries weight unevenly. The Council of Europe’s own materials and legal analyses explain how cross-border evidence requests work. In practice, countries with more intelligence capacity, more servers inside their borders, and more platform jurisdiction get more from “cooperation” than countries without those advantages. Put plainly: it’s easier for U.S. agencies to reach across borders for data held abroad than for many Global South states to compel data from firms guarded by U.S. law and power.
Another quiet part: the public-private handshake at home. Facebook publicly announced that it would work with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab to monitor narratives and advise the platform on influence and content moderation decisions. Investigations and academic work have documented how large U.S. platforms participate in influence and content-management programs aligned with Western security institutions—often framed as voluntary compliance or safety partnerships. However you label it, the record shows coordination. In 2022, internal correspondence released in the “Twitter Files,” followed by congressional testimony, showed federal-platform communications around visibility, labeling, and account actions. That’s not a value judgment; that’s the paper trail.
The geopolitical backdrop is not just vibes—it’s paperwork and infrastructure. After 2010, U.S. sanctions expanded across finance, shipping insurance, semiconductor supply, and other strategic sectors aimed at states like Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela. Reporting shows that Russia, for example, accelerated the development and tightening of its sovereign internet infrastructure (RuNet) specifically as sanctions pressure increased. These kinds of policy adjustments reflect how targeted states began prioritizing domestic network control, alternative routing, and insulation from foreign chokepoints even before the recent U.N. treaty negotiations. This restructuring was already underway before the recent U.N. treaty was drafted. That’s survival engineering, not a mystery.
Zoom out one more notch. BRICS+ states are now coordinating on digital standards and cross-border data systems, as reported by BRICS Today, and U.N. voting patterns over roughly 2012–2024 show blocs drifting away from U.S. preferences on tech governance and sovereignty questions. You can call that fragmentation or diversification; either way, it’s happening.
Line all of this up and a blunt contradiction steps forward. The United States presents itself as the defender of “internet freedom,” while the documented record includes: expanding domestic and international surveillance programs; prosecutions aimed at unauthorized disclosures; seizures of foreign-controlled digital assets under sanctions law; and offensive cyber operations abroad. The treaty fight sits inside that larger operating environment.
That’s the ledger—no melodrama, just the receipts. In the next section we’ll interpret what this adds up to: who holds the switch, who builds the pipes, who writes the rules, and why that matters for everyone who lives, works, and organizes on this networked planet.
The Internet Was Never Free — It Was Just American
Let’s stop pretending the internet was ever some neutral digital commons where human freedom simply “happened.” The internet was born in the U.S. security state, raised by the Pentagon, commercialized through Silicon Valley, and globalized under monopoly capital. What the op-ed calls a “free and open internet” was only ever free for Washington to monitor and open for U.S. corporations to colonize. And once you see that, the whole story shifts.
Google, Meta, Amazon Web Services, Cloudflare — these are not tech companies. They are the digital colonial office of the United States. They host the world’s data, route the world’s communications, set the protocols of public speech, and cooperate with U.S. intelligence agencies by design, not by accident. They are the glue between Wall Street, the Pentagon, State Department psychological operations, and the global command over narrative infrastructure. If the British Empire had gunboats and shipping monopolies, the American empire has data centers and content moderation departments.
This is why “net neutrality” died inside the U.S. first — not in Russia, not in China. Because the American ruling class needs the network to be shaped by capital — not the people who use it. When the FCC gutted net neutrality in 2017, it wasn’t “regulatory oversight changes.” It was the capitalist class declaring that the internet is not a public good, but a market to be carved, priced, surveilled, and weaponized. The empire didn’t lose the open internet — it never wanted one to begin with.
And when Yoo and Stradner say Russia and China are “threats to internet freedom,” what they mean is: these countries refuse to let U.S. companies and intelligence agencies run their networks. They refuse to let American platforms set the terms of public discourse. They refuse to let Silicon Valley decide what is legitimate thought. They refuse dependency — and in the eyes of empire, refusing dependency is the real sin.
The op-ed also pretends the U.S. is only “defending” against cyber threats — but Washington has been launching offensive cyber operations for decades. Stuxnet in Iran. Attacks on Venezuela’s electrical grid. Coordinated psyops in Cuba. NATO-aligned troll farms targeting Ethiopia, Bolivia, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria. Pentagon influence networks embedded inside Facebook, Instagram, Twitter — exposed in their own internal leaks. If Russia and China are doing censorship, the U.S. does infrastructure-level perception management. It doesn’t silence speech — it shapes reality.
So let’s be clear: Russia and China aren’t pushing for alternative cyber frameworks because they hate freedom. They are doing it because the current system is built to keep them subordinated. The U.S. wants a world where every communication runs through servers in Virginia, every narrative flows through Silicon Valley, every perception is modulated by U.S. algorithms, and every dissident anywhere on earth is one National Security Letter away from invisibility. That’s what “internet freedom” means in Washington: freedom for empire, not freedom for people.
The U.N. treaty fight is not about civil liberties. It is about jurisdiction. It is about empire losing its monopoly on the world’s data. It is about the slow death of a system where the U.S. gets to be the switchboard operator of planetary communication. This is not Russia and China “imposing authoritarianism.” This is the majority of the world saying: we will no longer live inside the servers of an empire that treats our communications as occupation territory.
The question before us is not whether sovereignty online is dangerous. The question is: dangerous to whom? To the state that bombs, sanctions, destabilizes, and surveils? Or to the billions who have never had the right to speak without being watched? The internet is becoming multipolar because the world is becoming multipolar. And empire is panicking because the age where one nation got to define truth for the entire planet is ending.
Reclaiming the Means of Communication
If the struggle over cybersecurity governance is, at its core, a struggle over who shapes the architecture of the internet, then the question that follows is not simply which state signs which treaty. It is who will have the power to speak, to organize, to remember, and to act in the world being formed. The infrastructures of communication are not neutral technical systems. They are the scaffolding of political life. The ability to gather, to teach, to share, to imagine, and to resist all move along the same digital channels that states now negotiate over. Whoever controls those channels controls the conditions of collective existence.
For working people in the United States and across the world, this means the stakes of this conflict do not lie at the level of diplomatic alignment alone. They lie in whether everyday communication remains hostage to private monopolies and security agencies, or whether communities and movements can build and maintain spaces where thought is not surveilled, where speech is not pre-filtered, and where organization is not pre-criminalized. The infrastructure of the internet can either consolidate hierarchy or expand the capacity of people to determine their own futures. The direction it takes will depend on whether those who rely on these networks most—workers, students, migrants, villagers, tenants, prisoners, and all who survive by cooperation—can intervene in how they are built and governed.
This intervention is not theoretical. Across the world, movements are already building alternatives. Community mesh networks maintain communications where telecommunications corporations will not. Cooperative hosting infrastructures are being developed to reduce dependence on platforms tied to state security agencies. Engineers, data workers, and platform moderators have begun to organize inside the very companies that design the tools of surveillance, raising questions about what labor is being used to produce and who benefits from that production. And in the Global South, alliances are emerging to develop new standards for data exchange and digital coordination that are not determined by former colonial powers.
The task now is to understand these efforts as part of a shared field of struggle rather than isolated experiments. To link neighborhood technology collectives to worker organizing inside major cloud providers. To connect movements for indigenous and communal autonomy to the fight for digital sovereignty. To treat the building of communication infrastructure as a form of political action rather than a technical hobby. The power of the internet was never in its wires or satellites; it was in the possibility that people who had been separated by borders, classes, and histories could recognize themselves as part of the same world. That possibility remains. But it will not survive without intention.
What is required is not only critique of state and corporate control, but construction of systems that are accountable to those who use them. This means developing local capacity to host, to store, to secure, and to circulate information. It means training and supporting workers who can maintain those systems outside the pressures of monopoly and militarization. It means building alliances between movements across continents that see digital autonomy as part of a larger struggle for land, resources, peace, and sovereignty. And it means refusing the idea that the only choices available are domination by one empire or absorption into another.
The future of communication is being negotiated now. It will belong either to the concentrated power of those who already command the global order, or to the collective agency of those who labor to live within it. If working people and the colonized do not act to shape the networks that carry their voices, those networks will continue to shape them. To defend the right to speak is not merely to demand access to platforms. It is to build the capacity to own, govern, and transform the very systems that make speech possible.
Weaponized Information 
Leave a comment