Beijing, meanwhile, is not shy about using its political and economic heft to blot out dissent beyond China’s borders, employing tactics that blend politics and commerce. The process starts at home: Foreign media firms seeking access to China’s enormous markets face intense pressure from Communist Party gatekeepers to make odious concessions on content control and privacy. Then, the chilling effects spread overseas. This has already happened in Hollywood: If you can’t distribute a film like “Seven Years in Tibet” in China’s giant market, why bother making it at all? (That 1997 project would never be greenlit today.) Facebook, long locked out of the Chinese market, is flirting with censorship in a likely bid to gain entry. After the Facebook page of Guo Wengui, a prominent regime critic living in exile, vanished last spring, Facebook blamed a systems error. As a private corporation, it is under no obligation to provide more detail.

As the incentives and opportunities to self-censor accumulate, content providers will gravitate to producing and promoting whatever reaches the most customers worldwide, even if that means pleasing Chinese cyber-commissars who control access to a billion of them. Content providers — companies like Facebook and LinkedIn — are not, after all, common carriers. They do not control the pipes, or carry a unique public trust in the eyes of the government. As private businesses, they are not bound by the First Amendment. Self-censorship is simply good business.

It is much more dangerous to grant American telecom companies — those that do control the pipes — the right to tamper with data flows and discriminate among content. American businesses’ track record of helping China export censorship and Beijing’s aggressive and platform-agnostic efforts to squelch unwanted speech overseas are a dangerous combination.

For those telecom conglomerates that have current or potential business before the Chinese government, the temptation to take behind-the-scenes guidance on content “management” as a quid pro quo for market access may prove irresistible. China already exports its cutting-edge internet censorship technologies, honed in the world’s largest natural laboratory for “opinion guidance,” to authoritarian countries around the world. These technologies are masterpieces of subtlety and sophistication, offering a world-class censorship experience amenable to consumers and commissars alike. They rarely resort to the “hard” censorship of crude deletion, but rather give a suite of “softer” monitoring and management tools to steer public discourse and discourage all but the most dogged netizens from accessing undesirable content. For those who stick to domestic and approved Chinese sites, the browsing experience is speedy and seamless, the sutures where unwanted content has been excised barely visible.

Browsing the web in China today, one rarely encounters the once ubiquitous “your connection has been reset” or “due to relevant laws and regulations, this content cannot be shown.” You’re likelier to endure a load time that’s just a split-second too long, get bored and move elsewhere. Under this system, even content creators who refuse self-censorship, regardless of consequences — such as The Times, which has been blocked in China since reporting on the party leaders’ family wealth in 2012 — may find their ability to reach consumers at the mercy of the companies that run the pipes. Without net neutrality, American firms will have no obligation to provide equal access for content, and minimal statutory requirement to explain why one piece of content might arrive more slowly than another.