Trump Ends America’s Leadership on Internet Freedom

On January 7, President Donald Trump issued a sweeping directive withdrawing from 66 international organizations, conventions, and treaties deemed “contrary to the interests of the United States.” Buried among climate, development, and human rights bodies was a decision with outsized strategic implications: US withdrawal from the Freedom Online Coalition (FOC)—the only alliance explicitly committed to defending human rights and openness on the Internet.

This was not an obscure bureaucratic adjustment. It was a declaration. The US has now formally stepped away from a core element of the normative architecture it helped build to shape the global Internet. Whatever rhetoric Washington continues to use domestically and internationally, the message is unmistakable: Internet freedom is no longer a pillar of US foreign policy.

The FOC was launched in 2011 at a ministerial conference in The Hague, at a moment when optimism about the Internet’s democratic potential was still intact but already under strain. Then–Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton used the occasion to articulate a simple proposition: that the same rights people enjoy offline—freedom of expression, privacy, association—must be protected online.