Format. Break into groups of 4–5. Each group picks one of the two breakouts below (or takes both if time allows). Spend ~5 minutes skimming the prep reads, then ~10 minutes debating. A designated reporter brings the group’s position — and any dissents — back to the full class for a ~3-minute report-back.
The purpose here is not to reach consensus. It is to make explicit the tradeoffs that Chapter 1 argues are the defining feature of modern information control: control moves across layers (technical, regulatory, economic, social), and no single lens captures the whole picture.
Breakout A: Age-Verification Laws — Child Protection or Speech Tax?
Motion. “Nationwide age-verification requirements for online platforms are a legitimate child-protection measure and should not be classified as a form of information control.”
Prep reads (5–10 min).
Discussion prompts.
- The UK (Online Safety Act), EU (Digital Services Act), and Australia all frame these laws as child protection. Chapter 1 argues that when compliance is expensive, verification requirements become “a legal and economic tax on speech.” Which framing is right? Can both be true?
- Age-verification requires either uploading government ID or submitting to AI-based face-scanning age estimation. What does that do to the population of people willing (or able) to post at all? Is this a speech effect, a privacy effect, or both?
- Australia’s early data: 4.7 million under-16 accounts removed in the first weeks. Some kids reportedly drew on facial hair to fool the AI estimator. Does that undermine the law’s purpose, prove it’s working, or neither?
- Freedom House rates the UK, EU member states, and Australia as “Free.” Should we update that assessment? What would it take?
Bring back. One thing your group agreed on, and the sharpest point of disagreement.
Breakout B: Consolidation as the New Chokepoint
Motion. “Infrastructure consolidation — a handful of CDNs, cloud providers, and DNS operators — is now a bigger threat to free expression online than any government firewall.”
Prep reads (5–10 min).
- Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025 — official post-mortem — Cloudflare, 2025. Root cause: a database permissions change ballooned a config file, crashing bot-management everywhere. Not an attack.
- Cloudflare says outage that hit X, ChatGPT and other sites is resolved — CNBC, 18 Nov 2025. Scope of the outage across X, ChatGPT, Shopify, Truth Social, NJ Transit, and others.
- Cloudflare Outage Knocks X and ChatGPT Offline — Forbes, 18 Nov 2025. Context: AWS and Azure had major outages in the preceding weeks.
Discussion prompts.
- The Nov 2025 Cloudflare outage was caused by a routine internal change, not an attack or a takedown demand. In what sense — if any — is this “censorship”? Chapter 1’s framework of “information control” is broader than intent-based censorship. Where does an unintentional systemic failure fit?
- Cloudflare’s CEO in 2017: “I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power.” Nine years later, that power has grown, not shrunk. Is the right response (a) breaking up the infrastructure providers, (b) regulating them as common carriers, (c) building parallel decentralized alternatives, or (d) accepting the tradeoff because centralization has real performance and security benefits?
- The 2011 Egypt Internet shutdown required coordinating with a handful of ISPs. The 2011 BART cell shutdown required coordinating with even fewer parties. What’s the equivalent chokepoint number today in the US? In your country?
- Compare an authoritarian regime’s Great Firewall to a Western democracy’s dependence on 3–4 CDNs. From a citizen’s point of view — access to information — which is more consequential in practice?
Bring back. Your group’s ranking of the four responses (breakup / common-carrier reg / decentralized alternatives / accept tradeoffs), and why.
Instructor notes
These breakouts map directly to two of the “Section takeaways” boxes in Chapter 1:
- A touches the “four flavors” takeaway (technical, social, regulatory, financial) — specifically the argument that compliance costs are themselves a form of control.
- B touches the “globalization of censorship” takeaway — that the mechanisms once associated with authoritarian regimes now exist by default in liberal democracies, and the difference is who chooses to pull the lever.
If time is short, Breakout A tends to produce more heat (students have direct experience with these laws or have friends affected); Breakout B tends to produce more depth (students who’ve read the technical primer engage with the layer diagram).