To promote freedom of expression on the Internet, to protect United States businesses from coercion to participate in repression by authoritarian foreign governments, and for other purposes.

While the original version of this proposal was well intentioned I raised some serious objections to it. This version is much better. The export provisions have been cleaned up considerably and the right answers are far more likely to be reached through the process envisioned here than the one that was proposed by the prior bill.

The provisions about hosting computers have been improved as well, but it remains to be seen if the changes are sufficient to make this workable. This bill simply prohibits U.S. companies from storing personal information about their customers in "internet restricting" countries. It really depends on how people have their technologies architected, but this is at least plausible. I think minimally there should be a grace period for reaching this goal, but if anything kills the bill it will be this provision.

Unfortunately the bill that I did like last year, which funded development of circumvention technology, does not appear to have been reproposed. However, that work could be funded under the Office of Internet Freedom proposed here.

The Global Online Freedom Act is back, and this time it looks much better!