UPDATE, 29 September 2026 – I did get the opportunity to provide comment to the Committee, and am pleased to report that the Wyoming GRANITE Act passed out of Committee 4-1, on a bipartisan vote, so it is headed towards introduction in the next general session.
Also, I found out after delivering these comments that Senator Mike Lee has introduced the federal GRANITE Act in the United States Senate, S. 5478. This is a companion to the federal GRANITE Act first introduced by Rep. Michael Rulli in the House of Representatives as H.R. 10174.
Let’s hope the federal GRANITE Act racks up some cosponsors soon and federal action follows.
My testimony:
[Original post follows]
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There is a very slim chance I might be able to sneak in and give some testimony to the Wyoming Select Committee on Blockchain, Financial Technology, & Digital Innovation tomorrow to advocate in favor of passing the Wyoming GRANITE Act.
If I am fortunate enough to sneak in an appearance, I would deliver these brief remarks.
If not, I publish them for the Committee’s benefit and to ask the members of the Committee, of both parties, to advance the bill.
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Mr. Chairman, Members of the Committee:
My name is Preston Byrne. I am a lawyer in solo practice, and not a lobbyist. For my day job, I advise early-stage startups on commercial and regulatory law problems.
Imagine, if you will, the following scene.
You run a small website in the United States. A discussion board, or something of that nature. One evening, you’re at home, with your spouse, watching your children play on the floor, when your phone buzzes. In your living room, sitting by your fireside, in America, you open your inbox.
Inside is correspondence from the British government threatening you with imprisonment, and up to twenty-five million dollars in fines, for doing nothing other than exercising your First Amendment rights online. You have broken no law in the United States. You have done nothing wrong.
You call your lawyer. Your lawyer has never seen anything like it. As the British laws which generated this letter were only enacted in 2023, no one ever has. This is truly novel international tyranny and extortion. Your lawyer, uncertain as to whether the letter can be enforced against you, tells you that you had better obey the letter, or else.
This scene is not imaginary; it has actually happened. Moreover, it has repeated itself at least 197 times, and likely more than that, over the last 18 months in the United States, with orders emanating from countries including the UK, Australia, Brazil, and Russia. The targets are hundreds of American websites used by hundreds of millions of American citizens.
Four, and only four, American websites publicly refused these orders.** All four are my clients. I represent all of them pro bono in this matter.
Ofcom, in its letters to my clients, claimed its orders overrode the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. We sued the British regulator, the Office of Communications or Ofcom, in federal court in Washington, D.C. The Court said it had no jurisdiction to hear the case, but if it had, Ofcom’s orders probably wouldn’t be enforceable in the United States.
Probably, but not certainly.
Every one of those 197 Americans is being asked to bet their livelihoods, and their freedom, on a “probably.” No American should have to do that. Many Americans won’t take that risk. 98% of Ofcom’s targets complied.
The bill before you solves that problem by making it clear that, in the State of Wyoming, foreign censorship orders that would violate the First Amendment and the Constitution of the State of Wyoming are categorically unenforceable, as they should be.
The GRANITE Act began life as a blog post after I gave a talk in New Hampshire on the foreign censorship problem. After explaining the issue to a room full of NH legislators, one of them, Rep. Calvin Beaulier, asked if there was anything he could do to help. I went home that night and drafted version one of the legislative solution.
The GRANITE proposal was directly inspired by the federal SPEECH Act, 28 U.S.C §§ 4101-4105, and its state-law predecessor, the New York Libel Terrorism Protection Act, which amended NY CPLR 302, in each case to render foreign civil libel judgments unenforceable in the U.S. (or New York) where those judgments are repugnant to the Constitution.
Not being a lobbyist, and therefore being somewhat inexperienced in political matters, I tried to nonetheless think like a lobbyist to maximize what would be the most crowd-pleasing naming convention for my audience at that time, which was (a) very small and (b) consisted entirely of New Hampshire legislators – keeping in mind that New Hampshire is known as the “Granite State.” For this reason, I named the solution the GRANITE Act, Guaranteeing Rights Against Novel International Tyranny and Extortion.
The legislative creature now known as the GRANITE Act, however, is very much a creation of the State of Wyoming. Representative Singh and Deputy Secretary of State Colin Crossman took my skeleton concept and turned it into a fully-fledged, complete, comprehensive, introduction-ready bill, the Wyoming GRANITE Act of 2026, a later version of which, incorporating many comments made before the House and Senate Judiciary Committees last year, is now before this committee. New Hampshire is still cogitating while Wyoming is legislating.
Wyoming’s effort was so well-executed that copies began cropping up elsewhere almost immediately.
A version of the bill was filed in West Virginia within days of introduction in the Wyoming House. Over the summer, Representative Singh pitched this bill as the basis for a national model policy at ALEC, and ALEC reportedly adopted it unanimously. A New Hampshire version of the ALEC model was pre-filed in that state on September 1st. All of this has happened in the last 8 months.
In the last 30 days, not one, but two federal bills in Congress, the GRANITE Act, H.R. 10174, and the HOMEFRONT Act, H.R. 10309, each originating in Ohio, trace their lineage directly to what all of you, in Wyoming, started. For context, the SPEECH Act took four years to see the inside of a state house and six to make it to Congress. GRANITE is advancing, across the country, roughly 6.5 times faster than the SPEECH Act, with Wyoming at the leading edge of a growing, national movement.
I would ask that this Committee finish what Wyoming started: make Wyoming the first state in the Union where a law-abiding American can read an unconstitutional foreign censorship order that is transmitted directly into his home from abroad, ignore it and throw it in the trash in complete safety, and go back to be with his family and enjoy the freedoms to which every American is entitled.
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** Note: my cases are by no means the only ones in this area. Practically every significant U.S. tech company faces some aspect of this problem from some country. Other relevant instances include:
1) The Human Rights Foundation was censored three weeks ago by its US-based webhost as a result of a Russian censorship order, banning its “Tyranny Tracker” – which criticized Putin’s regime – from being viewable in Russia, despite the fact that the web servers in question are entirely based in the United States.
2) Rumble and Truth Social, served with censorship orders by Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, sued him in Florida, challenging the orders’ enforceability in the United States. Brazil has intervened in the Truth Social case and asserted sovereign immunity.
3) Starlink had $3.3 million of its assets seized to pressure then-independent social media company X to carry out censorship, prior to those companies being merged into a single entity, simply because Elon Musk was in each company’s cap table.
4) X Corp is challenging an EU fine under the Digital Services Act in the European General Court for constitutionally protected speech and conduct. The U.S. Department of Justice filed a request to intervene in that case last week, citing comity issues.
5) Cloudflare, the United States’ preeminent CDN provider, was fined EUR 13 million by Italy for conduct shielded by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and the First Amendment’s intermediary liability doctrine.
6) Wikipedia sued UK Ofcom in England over its regulatory categorization in 2025, under the English rulebook, and lost. The company has, like my clients, vowed to refuse any UK censorship order it receives.
7) Meta sued Ofcom, also in England, over its methodology for calculating Online Safety Act fees – effectively, taxes on speech. The case continues.
8) Reddit sued Australia’s eSafety Commissioner in December 2025, in Australia, seeking judicial review of its designation as a banned platform. The case continues.
