Right on the heels of Meta’s new policies against “fact checking,” and two years after Elon Musk took Twitter private on a mission to save free speech, Google has declined to cooperate with the EU’s new Digital Services Act (DSA), a wild piece of censorship legislation demanding “fact checks” on search results and YouTube videos. Axios broke the story, and implied Google’s decision was inevitable — the company has never required anything like this before, and already signaled it wouldn’t comply. But I can’t help but wonder how different things would be had Lil Coconut won the White House. Over the past few months, Trump has taken calls from every major tech leader. They want protection from the EU. He wants tech’s unofficial leftwing censorship apparatus dismantled. It’s not difficult to understand what’s happening here, we just haven’t seen it in a while: it’s the art of the deal. Welcome back.