[callahad]

I moved from the US to the UK. I don't feel like my access is any different, aside from the many North American sites that block all European IPs for fear of the GDPR.

Notably, smaller ISPs tend to be exempted from the surveillance and censorship requirements. And you actually have a choice of ISPs, because infrastructure and service providers are kept separate, unlike the monopolies in the States.

So, for example, Andrews and Arnold ("AA ISP") tends to take a pretty strong stance as outlined at https://www.aa.net.uk/broadband/real-internet/. Very old-school, clueful hacker vibe. Hell, they even GPG sign their invoices.

They're also happy to proactively inform their customers about legislative corner cases, like how the overbroad legal definition of a "communications provider" allows customers to legitimately self-identify in such a way that compels A&A to discard copyright infringement notices (https://www.aa.net.uk/legal/legal-status-customers/).

There are legislative threats in the UK, like the recent Draft Communications Data Bill ("Snooper's Charter"), or government-funded campaigns against encrypted communications (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29955893). Those scare me. But thus far they've generally been beaten back, much the same as SOPA/PIPA were Stateside.