Freedom House moves the US down a spot in its global internet freedom rankings citing net neutrality repeal, surveillance law renewal, disinformation, and more
Context & Ripple Effects
The downgrade is the scoreboard moment for a fight that ran all year: the FCC's Restoring Internet Freedom order repealing the 2015 net neutrality rules entered the Federal Register in February and immediately drew legal challenges, and Freedom House is now counting that repeal — alongside surveillance law renewal and disinformation — against the United States' own score.
It matters because the US had long been the reference democracy in these rankings; the same report series later logged a 15th consecutive year of global decline in 2025, so this 2018 slip reads as the point where the US stopped being an exception and joined the downward curve it usually diagnosed elsewhere.
First-order effects
- The United States drops one spot in Freedom House's global internet freedom rankings, with the net neutrality repeal, surveillance law renewal, and disinformation formally recorded as the causes.
- The FCC's repeal, already facing legal challenges since entering the Federal Register, now carries an international-standing cost on top of its domestic litigation risk.
Second-order effects
- A downgraded US has thinner ground to stand on when pressing other governments over censorship and surveillance, weakening the leverage behind American internet-freedom advocacy — a program line the Guardian later reported was effectively gutted after dispensing $500M+ since 2016.
- Rival powers gain a ready-made rebuttal: when Washington criticizes foreign internet controls, the Freedom House scorecard now supplies a documented counterexample.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — and the same report series went on to record declines in 2019, 2021, and through 2025 — annual erosion stops being news and becomes the baseline expectation for democracies as well as autocracies.
- Rankings like Freedom on the Net harden into recurring diplomatic instruments, with each country's yearly movement scrutinized as a proxy for rule-of-law drift rather than a one-off assessment.
The trend: Internet freedom is in a sustained multi-year global decline in which the United States has shifted from benchmark to participant, measured year over year by Freedom House's rankings.