On September 18 at 23:30, a group of people gathered around a computer, hesitating to press the shutdown button for the Autistici/Inventati (A/I) servers. Three minutes later, someone finally did, ending a 25-year fight against the commercialization of the internet while providing a free, anonymous web to those who did not want to sell their data to private companies. In over two decades, the Italian NGO built a digital infrastructure that hosted 16,000 email accounts, 1,500 websites, 5,500 mailing lists, and roughly 20,000 blogs.
While A/I has a long track-record of resisting state repression, the shutdown happened without a court order, charges, or publicly released evidence. The mano longa of the Trump Administration extended its power and influence over the Atlantic by designating the tech collective a terrorist organization, claiming its infrastructure provided encrypted communication tools for other groups. All economic actors linked with the collective had one month to comply with the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)—cut ties or risk sanctions exposure themselves. Within 48 hours, A/I’s PayPal credentials were already erased and its bank account at the Italian Banca Etica frozen. Now, A/I is suing the bank to regain access to their money, but the damage is already done and its servers lay offline.
What A/I actually built was proof that all of this could be refused at once: communication without a data profile, existence without being watched, an internet without arbitrary corporate power and censorship. In the past ten years, the internet has seen its free spaces increasingly targeted and restricted, and the designation of A/I shows that anything that grows big enough to become an obstacle to profit must be chased. It sends a clear message to anyone who wants privacy today: you will be next.
Thirty years have passed since John Perry Barlow, an American Cyberlibertarian activist, wrote the “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” basically telling world governments they had no authority over the internet—that it was a new space beyond their reach. “On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather,” he wrote. Needless to say, in the decades to come, giant tech corporations went in the opposite direction, backed by governments around the world.
Today, three companies—Amazon, Microsoft, and Google—take in 63% of global cloud computing spending; in other words, most websites and apps run on servers owned by one of the three. No one really knows the precise numbers behind their physical infrastructure—data centers, servers, optic cables—but these companies have de facto formed an oligopoly in the digital realm. No one can really claim the internet has been “free by nature” since cables and servers sit in countries with juridical power over the technicalities of the internet, but the open web has become a fraction of what it used to be, and these companies sit on top of it.
So while a handful of companies handle most of the data traffic, Autistici/Inventati, one of a kind, provided secure connections well outside this realm. Through the EU legislators, the web has become increasingly scanned, and they are trying to contain end-to-end encrypted chats. For instance, a new piece of EU legislation is being negotiated right now, with a key meeting on September 29, potentially forcing all apps, including encrypted ones, to scan messages—which would mean building scanners that read your messages before they are encrypted. Signal Foundation, the non-profit entity behind the popular encrypted messenger app, already stated clearly it would rather leave the EU market than comply.
An increasing global surveillance system has extended worldwide, and not just in authoritarian states. Almost everything you do online, on commercial platforms, is tracked. Every ad you see, every “like,” every page visit gets logged and fed into the data broker industry—companies whose entire business is collecting details about you (where we live, what we buy, our health interests, even political views) and selling that profile to advertisers, insurers, or anyone who pays. Most people have never heard of these companies and never agreed, in any real sense, to be in their database.
Nobody makes money off an anonymous user, and the numbers show exactly how much is at stake. Meta made nearly $200 billion in 2025, and 98% of it was advertising. Meta, Google, and Amazon together now take more than 60% of worldwide digital advertising revenue. That business only works if the platforms know who you are, and the option to use the internet without identifying yourself is being engineered out, on purpose, one field at a time: your name, your email, your date of birth. This is exactly why an infrastructure like A/I had started to bother very powerful interests: it was living proof an alternative was possible.
It isn’t only about speech anymore. It’s about whether you can function as a human in this system. Globally, 86% of adults now own a mobile phone, and a phone has become the main gateway into having a bank account at all—global account ownership jumped from 51% to 79% of adults between 2011 and 2024, almost entirely through phone-based access. In Italy, cash is disappearing at the same pace: cashless payments passed €500 billion for the first time in 2025, equal to 26.6 percent of the country’s entire GDP, triple what it was in 2015. Even a €1.30 coffee gets logged now.
On top of the commercial tracking, governments use artificial intelligence — facial recognition, automated social media monitoring — to track immigrants, journalists, legal observers and protesters. Larry Ellison, the Oracle co-founder whose company now holds major federal AI contracts and who has fundraised for Trump, laid out the logic in 2024: “Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.” And it does not stop at watching: Israel’s “Lavender” system generated a Gaza kill list of roughly 37,000 people from mass surveillance data, and the U.S. has confirmed using AI targeting in its own war against Iran. At the same time, Access Now, a monitoring group tracking government-ordered internet shutdowns as they happen, documented 313 cases across 52 countries in 2025, a new record.
Every year, Freedom House—an organization substantially financed by the U.S. government—compiles a report called Freedom on the Net. This year’s results are disheartening: the internet is more controlled and manipulated today than at any point since they started measuring it. Freedom of speech is directly linked to how the internet gets restricted; it is the basis on which the whole index is scored.
The report also reveals we are not talking about far-away authoritarian countries. Ten years ago, the United States and Germany sat in the world’s top five most free internet environments, alongside Estonia, Iceland and Canada. This year, the U.S. recorded its lowest score ever, behind Costa Rica, Chile and Taiwan, and posted, together with Germany, one of the two steepest declines of any country still rated “free.” Only eighteen countries in the world hold that rating today. The findings point directly to the heart of liberal democracies, not away from them.
In Europe, Italy is its own case study. In January 2025, WhatsApp notified around 90 people across Europe, seven of them in Italy, that Paragon’s Graphite spyware had been used against them — among them the migrant-rescue activists Luca Casarini and Giuseppe Caccia, and Francesco Cancellato, editor of Fanpage, the outlet that had exposed racism and fascist nostalgia inside the youth wing of Giorgia Meloni’s party. Three months later, Citizen Lab forensically confirmed that a second Fanpage journalist, Ciro Pellegrino, had also been hit with Graphite through a zero-click attack on his iPhone—the one case in the entire scandal with hard technical proof behind it. The government’s account shifted repeatedly: first denial, then a refusal to answer parliamentary questions by citing state secrecy, then an admission, once Paragon itself said it had cut Italy off as a client. Italy has since fallen to 49th place in the World Press Freedom Index, below Gabon.
The designation of Autistici/Inventati is the precedent that should scare us all. While U.S. counterterrorism sanctions had already targeted specific European political networks nine months earlier, A/I marks the first time that coercive machinery is expanded to general-utility infrastructure. And notably absent from the whole process are the Italian institutions. No Italian judge, prosecutor or court was ever involved. Treasury’s OFAC, working with the State Department, made the call alone, and A/I never had a courtroom to walk into. A Specially Designated Global Terrorist listing — a U.S. sanctions category that freezes any assets under American jurisdiction and makes it illegal for U.S. citizens or companies to do business with the designated entity — is not a charge. It is an administrative sanction with no meaningful way to contest it before the damage is already done.
A/I rejected the accusations outright, describing its own work as digital self-defense infrastructure and identifying as anti-fascist, anti-militarist, and anti-capitalist. Some of what Washington cited was more specific than “hosting websites.” Reporting out of Italy links the case to unproven claims that A/I-hosted outlets published responsibility claims and bomb-making instructions tied to a string of 2026 sabotage attacks: railway sabotage in France, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands, and the March 2026 attack on the Trans-Alpine pipeline.
This wasn’t the opening shot of the “Antifa” witch-hunt. It’s the nine-month mark. Washington issued NSPM-7, a directive Trump signed in September 2025, a few days after the killing of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. Trump ordered federal agencies to investigate “political violence,” defined broadly enough to cover organized protest movements generally, and designated four anarchist-linked European groups as terrorist organizations that November. A/I is what happens when a year-old campaign reaches past a named group and takes out the infrastructure thousands of individuals and organizations were quietly relying on.
The sanctions take full effect on September 25, and protests are already planned in several Italian cities, including a march in Rome. Despite the protests, the counter-actions are weak compared to the reach of U.S. power over other countries’ jurisdictions. And the European Union is not just passively watching, it is building its own version of the same impulse: the September 29 meeting that could force encrypted communications out of Europe is about Brussels reaching for the power to open what used to be private.
The sad reality is that you will be next. So, in the words of A/I:
“Now put down the computer, go outside, fight, hug each other, and don’t lose your smile. Because we are stopping. But the resistance and the ideas are not.
Stay human.”
