A European service, Autistici/Inventati, switched off from Washington

How a US terror designation closed an Italian privacy collective without any European order.

I missed what happened to Autistici/Inventati in September. It deserved more attention than it received, because it shows with unusual clarity how vulnerable the European internet is to US technological and financial power.

What happened

The facts, as reported by La Voce di New York, Domani and Reuters, are these. On 26 August 2026 the US State and Treasury departments designated Autistici/Inventati (A/I) a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist”. The US said the collective provides tools to left-wing groups it links to violence. It published no evidence. A/I denies the allegations.

A/I is an Italian collective, not a company. For 25 years it ran free, non-commercial privacy services: encrypted email, blogs, mailing lists and websites. It is often compared to Riseup and, more loosely, to Proton.

The consequences came quickly:

Banca Etica, an Italian ethical cooperative bank, suspended the collective’s account from 9 September, fearing secondary sanctions on its access to international payment systems.
PayPal blocked the donations account immediately.
The Public Interest Registry, the US nonprofit that runs the .org domain, stopped autistici.org from resolving normally.
On 6 September A/I announced it would close. On 18 September it switched off its servers: about 16,000 email accounts, 20,000 blogs, 5,500 mailing lists and 1,500 websites.

A lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights said a legal challenge is close to futile, because most of the evidence is classified. A designation without published evidence is also a designation that cannot be contested.

Compliance without a European order

The detail I find most instructive is the bank. Banca Etica publicly criticised the political use of US sanctions, and still froze the account. A/I called this over-compliance, since no legally binding order had been made in Italy.

That is the mechanism in miniature. No European court ruled and no European authority issued an order. The cut-off ran through three dependencies, each of which runs through something owned elsewhere: the bank’s access to dollar payments, PayPal, and the .org registry.

A European service hosted on European infrastructure was switched off from the US, and in at least one case, Banca Etica, a European institution did the work itself, in anticipation of consequences rather than under legal compulsion. Banca Etica’s position was not irrational. Its fear of secondary sanctions was a fear about its own access to the payment system.

A chokepoint in practice

Farrell and Newman call this weaponised interdependence; Edward Fishman called it chokepoints. The dominant currency paradigm, a hierarchy of money, explains the logic of Banca Etica. Absent measures, money tends towards one system, organised in a hierarchy. European banks need access to the dollar, and whoever controls that access controls what those banks dare to do.

The domain registry is a bit different. Control over a key layer of infrastructure lets its US owner shut down a service, by remotely flicking a switch, regardless of European law and regardless of where the service is built or who owns it.

The layers beneath

There is a warning here for those who treat sovereignty as a matter of the product and location. Proton for example is Swiss. But a European service that depends on a US domain registry, US payment providers or banks tied to the dollar can be cut off in the same way. Cryptography and European ownership at one layer do not protect against dependencies at other layers.

What follows

I make no claim here about whether A/I’s designation was justified. The US has published nothing that allows anyone to judge, and that is precisely the point: the outcome did not depend on judgement being possible. Whatever one thinks of the collective, the structure that closed it is available against any service that sits on the same layers.

I learned what happened to Autistici/Inventati at the National Design Debate 2026, “Shaping Europe”, held on Friday 23 October at the Evoluon in Eindhoven, organised by Waag Futurelab and Next Nature as part of Dutch Design Week.