Is Pavel Durov the Next Julian Assange?

The French arrest and detention of Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov on poorly specified charges related to failures of content moderation and compliance with law enforcement is an outrage—and a reminder that, at least on the surface, Europe and the United States have fundamentally different approaches to unregulated speech that go back centuries. Recall that John Milton’s world-changing defense of an unlicensed press, Areopagitica, pointedly excluded Catholics while his former Cambridge classmate Roger Williams was living in what would become Rhode Island and defending “soul liberty” for all people, “paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or anti-Christian.” Bringing charges against, say, Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk for failure to moderate content? Maybe. But actually putting them in jail, however momentarily, seems unthinkable.

But Durov’s arrest should also serve as a reminder even to Americans who have yet to jettison governance models that seek to command and control speech. Governments and, in different and usually less effective and invasive ways, corporations and religions are still fighting a battle to control speech, freedom, and innovation despite no possible ultimate victory. If it’s not the clear collusion and coercion exposed in the Twitter and Facebook files and the Backpage online advertising case, it’s net neutrality and age verification to keep kids safe. Or attacking anonymous speech or false speech or Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act for letting too many people talk about too much stuff. Or it’s about minimizing the reach of wholly invented categories of speech like misinformation and disinformation. When he first ran for president in 2016, Donald Trump wouldn’t stop talking about how he wanted “to open up” our country’s libel laws, the better to sue his critics. Tim Walz, the Democratic candidate for vice president and a former social studies teacher for crying out loud, wrongly believes that “there’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.”

Shutting down speech isn’t a single thing pushed by a single person or group; it’s a spectrum of many different sorts of actions ranging from the brutish to the barely noticed. To make it more confusing, champions of free speech often reinvent themselves as opponents to it, especially when it becomes something newly urgent or vital, like “election integrity” or “science.” Sometimes, the entrepreneurs and innovators who helped enable more speech start to backtrack when it behooves them—or their shareholders—to start calling for regulations on the very technology they brought to market. (Hello, Mark Zuckerberg!)

In his 2013 book, The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be, Moisés Naím outlined the ways in which all different sorts of powerful institutions were surely, if slowly and incompletely, losing control. Naím argued that a world of more and more stuff and more and more literal and figurative mobility culminates in a “mentality” revolution in which even the wretched of the Earth demand participation: “The more contact we have with one another, the greater our aspirations,” he wrote for Reason in the same year that brothers Pavel and Nikolai Durov launched Telegram. And yet, he cautioned, “By no means is big power dead. The big, established players are fighting back, and in many cases are still prevailing. Dictators, plutocrats, corporate behemoths, and the leaders of the great religions will continue to be the defining factors in the lives of billions of people, even as they slowly lose market share.”

When it comes to speech, especially speech on the internet, Durov’s arrest is merely the latest example. At the time of this writing, he is being held in custody by French authorities, an act troubling enough that French President Emmanuel Macron has taken to X to assert that his country “is deeply committed to freedom of expression and communication, to innovation, and to the spirit of entrepreneurship.” Yet the arrest seems more like something the Chinese government would do (and has done, with journalists such as Jimmy Lai, the publisher of the pro-democracy Apple Daily, and with Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba).

A refugee from his native Russia, Durov fled to France, where he holds citizenship, after refusing to turn over user data for a social networking platform he built to the Putin regime. If he is truly such a flight risk that he must be held (Durov is also a citizen of the United Arab Emirates), it would behoove French authorities to share more than they currently are. Contra Macron’s platitudes, France has seen its free-speech status slip over the past year, after it banned TikTok in New Caledonia and its Interior minister called for a ban on pro-Palestinian rallies after the October 7 attacks on Israel.

The distance from Julian Assange, who spent well over a decade in various forms of involuntary confinement after publishing government documents, to Durov is shorter than it might appear, and the trend always goes in one direction: The people who want to keep speech and information under lock and key go after the people who want to force transparency and hold space for more discussion. God help you if you create a way to share that information and discuss it without asking permission.

One of the great fears post-Gutenberg was the unlicensed press, a world in which all sorts of people could speak however they wanted, often with anonymity and always without permission. It’s easy to see why that would freak out monarchies, governments, and the church. But the right to say what you want without asking permission was what Milton, within his limits, was arguing about, and it’s still what we are arguing about.

Those of us who came of age during the first flush on internet freedom thought for a moment that we had finally kicked free of the rotting husk of the old physical world and launched ourselves into a final destination that would be perfectly free. “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind,” wrote John Perry Barlow in his 1996 document, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” “You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather….We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”

Durov’s arrest shows how wrong that sort of thinking is, and probably always will be. The fight for free speech—and for freedom in general—will exist as long as humanity does.

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