You're absolutely right. As an American, it is shameful the direction we've been going all in the name of 'safety'. If the "most free country on Earth" starts clamping down this hard, and spends copious amounts of time engineering forms of technical censorship/suppression, there is little or no reason to expect anywhere else to not do any different.

To be frank, America has lost a strategic asset in the form of being an attractive place to come for the best and brightest to try to realize something unfettered; and we're not doing a damn thing to export anything that creates any semblance of assurance that the American experiment's results are any better than anywhere else's.

The bar has been lowered so far it isn't even funny.