House investigators say regulatory regimes in South Korea and the European Union are pressuring American platforms to change global content policies, burdening U.S. businesses and restricting speech beyond foreign borders.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
Foreign governments are using digital regulation to impose costly penalties on American technology companies and pressure online platforms into adopting worldwide content restrictions that can affect speech inside the United States, according to congressional investigators examining policies in South Korea and Europe.
The House Judiciary Committee has broadened its inquiry into what lawmakers describe as a growing international censorship threat, warning that regulations framed as privacy, competition or online-safety measures can force U.S. companies to apply foreign speech standards across their global services.
The committee’s latest scrutiny has centered on South Korea, where regulators imposed a record $410 million penalty on Coupang, a U.S.-owned e-commerce company based in Seoul, following a major data breach.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said the Coupang case reflects a wider pattern in which foreign governments use regulatory authority against successful American businesses.
“I think it’s very serious, and even in the short term, just this attack on American companies we’re seeing around the world,” Jordan said Wednesday during an appearance on Just the News, No Noise. “Coupang in South Korea is the latest example, but it’s been going on in Europe.”
The congressional investigation and its broader concerns were detailed in a Just the News report.
South Korea’s Personal Information Protection Commission, known as the PIPC, issued the $410 million fine after a breach involving as many as 37.6 million Coupang accounts.
The exposed information represented personal data associated with more than 70% of South Korea’s population, according to the commission.
A 35-page House Judiciary Committee report nevertheless accused Seoul of enforcing its rules discriminatorily against the company, often described as South Korea’s equivalent of Amazon.
The committee noted that the Coupang penalty was the largest ever imposed by the South Korean privacy regulator, despite other breaches involving Chinese-linked companies that lawmakers argued may have been more severe.
Investigators also objected to threats of criminal prosecution against Coupang interim CEO Harold L. Rogers, an American citizen.
“Unfortunately, the ROK recently leveraged a low-sensitivity data leak in November 2025 as a pretext to launch a whole-of-government assault on Coupang,” 54 Republican lawmakers wrote in an April letter to South Korea’s ambassador.
The committee’s concerns extend beyond the privacy fine.
South Korea has been advancing digital-platform and competition rules that lawmakers say resemble European regulations and could disproportionately affect American companies.
The proposed Online Platform Markets Act, supported by left-leaning President Lee Jae-myung and promoted by the Korea Fair Trade Commission, was modeled in part on the European Union’s Digital Markets Act.
The European law regulates large technology companies designated as “gatekeepers” and states that its purpose is to make the digital economy “fairer and more contestable.”
The Competere Foundation estimated that South Korea’s platform legislation and related competition policies could cost the United States $525 billion in economic activity during the next decade.
Lawmakers and administration officials are also objecting to amendments to South Korea’s Information and Communications Network Act that took effect Tuesday.
The amended law requires platforms, including Google, Meta and X, to block information classified as “false and manipulated.” Technology executives could face prosecution if their companies refuse to comply.
The State Department warned Seoul that the measure could impose excessive obligations on American businesses while encouraging broad regulation of lawful speech.
“The United States has significant concerns with the ROK government’s approval of an amendment to the Network Act that risks negatively impacting the business of U.S.-based online platforms and undermining free speech,” the department’s press office told The Korea Times.
The department also cautioned against “disproportionate burdens” on U.S. platforms and excessive restrictions on online expression.
American officials had raised similar objections before the law took effect.
“South Korea’s proposed amendment to its Network Act, ostensibly focused on redressing defamatory deepfakes, reaches much further — and endangers tech cooperation,” Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers wrote in a December post on X.
Rogers traveled to South Korea in April and discussed those concerns with Public Diplomacy Minister Lim Sang-woo.
The South Korean measures have reinforced congressional concerns already developed through a separate investigation of the European Union’s Digital Services Act.
Jordan said foreign content rules can affect Americans because large technology companies frequently operate under a single set of worldwide moderation policies rather than separate systems for each country.
“When it comes to the technology companies, it’s censorship as well, limiting what can be said in Europe, ultimately impacts what we can say in America,” Jordan told Just the News.
In February, Jordan released an interim committee report examining the European censorship threat.
The report argued that demands from the European Commission caused major platforms to restrict lawful speech and political discussion, including content visible to users in the United States.
“Though often framed as combating so-called ‘hate speech’ or ‘disinformation,’ the European Commission worked to censor true information and political speech about some of the most important policy debates in recent history,” the report said.
The committee identified discussions involving COVID-19, mass immigration and transgender issues among the subjects affected by European moderation pressure.
As part of the investigation, Jordan subpoenaed executives from several major technology companies in February.
He later renewed the committee’s demands in letters to Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Reddit, Rumble, TikTok and xAI.
The committee requested communications between those companies and foreign governments, along with records explaining how the platforms complied with overseas censorship and content-regulation requirements.
Technology companies subsequently produced thousands of internal records and communications involving European Union member states and the European Commission, according to the committee.
“Documents produced to the Committee under subpoena reveal that the European Commission successfully pressured major social media platforms to change their global content moderation rules, directly harming American online speech in the United States,” the committee said in a statement accompanying its report.
Jordan argued that the scale and cost of European regulation make it difficult for businesses to operate while creating leverage over American companies.
“They’re so regulatory, the burden there is so, so extreme, it’s tough for companies to even make it in Europe, so they’re shaking down America,” Jordan said. “But it’s this whole mindset they have, and what it results in is an attack on American companies.”
The EU’s Digital Services Act, which took effect in 2022, established sweeping rules intended to reduce exposure to “illegal and harmful content.”
The law allows platforms to remove material identified as disinformation and provides mechanisms for users to report posts for review and removal.
Companies that violate the act can be fined as much as 6% of their worldwide revenue.
Elon Musk’s X was fined $140 million for alleged violations, according to the Judiciary Committee.
The European Commission said the violations included inadequate advertising transparency, “deceptive” use of blue verification marks and restrictions preventing researchers from using automated tools to collect public information.
The commission objected to X allowing users to obtain a blue mark by paying $8 per month, arguing that the system could mislead users about whether an account’s identity had been independently verified.
Vice President JD Vance criticized the enforcement action before the fine was announced.
“The EU should be supporting free speech, not attacking American companies over garbage,” Vance wrote in an X post.
He accused the commission of targeting X “for not engaging in censorship.”
The Trump administration began a broader campaign against the European law in August 2025.
The State Department directed American diplomats to lobby European governments to revise or repeal the Digital Services Act, according to an internal cable obtained by Reuters.
The congressional inquiry now treats the South Korean and European policies as parts of the same international trend.
In both cases, foreign governments are imposing large penalties, threatening executives, regulating platform design and requiring companies to police categories of online information that may include lawful political expression.
Because the affected businesses serve users around the world, lawmakers argue that compliance decisions made in response to regulators in Seoul or Brussels can alter what Americans are permitted to see or say online.
Jordan said the issue involves both free expression and foreign efforts to weaken the competitive position of American businesses.
“This is a real concern, something our community has been digging into from a censorship perspective, and then also just the basic perspective of other countries trying to shake down American companies,” he said.
Jordan added that foreign competitors “right now can’t compete with American companies, but they’re trying to change that.”
The committee’s continuing investigation is examining whether U.S. technology companies have changed global rules in response to overseas pressure, what communications they received from foreign governments and whether those decisions harmed speech protected by the First Amendment.
Lawmakers have not argued that the First Amendment directly controls the actions of foreign governments. Their concern is that overseas regulators can indirectly shape American speech by coercing companies headquartered in the United States into applying foreign restrictions across all markets.
As South Korea implements its amended Network Act and the European Union continues enforcing the Digital Services Act, congressional investigators and the Trump administration are signaling that foreign digital policy will remain a significant source of diplomatic and economic conflict.
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