On Tuesday, the U.S. State Department designated Autistici/Inventati — the Italy-based digital collective known as the A/I Collective — as a terrorist-supporting entity. The charge: providing “digital infrastructure” to Antifa cells and other far-left networks. The infrastructure in question includes encrypted email, web hosting, secure videoconferencing, and anonymity tools. The collective hosts roughly 16,000 mailboxes, 1,500 websites, 5,500 mailing lists, and 10,000 blogs.

Read that list again. The State Department did not sanction a terrorist group. It sanctioned a hosting provider.

A Utility Is Not a Terrorist Organization

The A/I Collective is not a cell of operatives. It is a digital utility. Its users include activists, journalists, privacy advocates, and — yes, according to the State Department — some people the U.S. government considers terrorists. That is the nature of infrastructure. The phone company does not vet every caller. The post office does not read every letter. The road does not ask where you are going.

The State Department’s own announcement makes the category error explicit. A/I is sanctioned not for what it does, but for what it is: a provider of neutral digital services. The designation marks what one Italian security analyst, speaking to decode39, called an unusual use of U.S. counterterrorism sanctions against a European technology collective whose main activity is providing digital infrastructure.

This is new. The U.S. has sanctioned banks that move money for terrorists, shipping companies that move weapons for terrorists, front companies that launder funds for terrorists. But this is the first time the target is a provider of encrypted email and web hosting — services used by thousands of people who have nothing to do with terrorism.

The Boomerang

The problem with sanctioning infrastructure is that the precedent does not stay where you aim it. If Washington can designate an Italian collective for hosting websites, Beijing can designate American cloud providers for hosting content the CCP does not like. Moscow can designate American VPN providers for enabling access to banned platforms. Tehran can designate American email providers for hosting dissident accounts.

The U.S. has just handed every authoritarian regime a legal template. And they will use it. They will use it against American companies, American infrastructure, American users. The State Department has spent years arguing that sanctions are a precise tool that targets bad actors while sparing innocents. This designation shreds that argument. You cannot sanction the pipes without sanctioning everyone who uses them.

The timing makes the pattern hard to miss. On August 18, the State Department sanctioned the president of the International Criminal Court, Tomoko Akane, and a senior ICC trial lawyer. On August 26, it sanctioned a privacy collective. The sanctions machinery is no longer aimed at terrorists. It is aimed at anyone the U.S. government decides it does not like.

The Chilling Effect

The rational response from every hosting provider, every email provider, every VPN operator is now obvious: neutrality is a liability. If you provide encrypted services to a broad user base, and some of your users end up on a U.S. designation list, you are a terrorist entity. The rational response is either to aggressively police your users — which kills the privacy your service exists to provide — or to exit the U.S. financial system entirely, which fragments the internet into jurisdiction-specific enclaves.

One operator of a small European hosting provider, reached by phone at his data center in Amsterdam, put it plainly: “We are now in the business of guessing which of our customers the U.S. government will designate next. That is not a business. That is a lottery.”

He is right. And the lottery has no winners — except the people who want the open internet to die.

The irony is that the people cheering this designation are often the same people who spent years arguing that tech platforms should be neutral, that private companies should not police speech, that the government should stay out of the internet. And the people who spent years arguing that platforms have a duty to remove harmful content are now watching the government do what platforms refused to do — and discovering they do not like it.

The A/I Collective will survive. Its users will move to the next provider, and the next, and the next. What will not survive is the idea that neutral infrastructure is something the United States respects. That idea died on Tuesday, in a State Department press release that mistook a utility for a terrorist organization.

Sources