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.

It's appropriate that, days after the French government arrested Pavel Durov, CEO of the encrypted messaging app Telegram, for failing to monitor and restrict communications as demanded by officials in Paris, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that his company, which owns Facebook, was subjected to censorship pressures by U.S. officials. Durov's arrest, then, stands as less of a one-off than as part of a concerted effort by governments, including those of nominally free countries, to control speech.

"Telegram chief executive Pavel Durov is expected to appear in court Sunday after being arrested by French police at an airport near Paris for alleged offences related to his popular messaging app," reported France24.

A separate story noted claims by Paris prosecutors that he was detained for "running an online platform that allows illicit transactions, child pornography, drug trafficking and fraud, as well as the refusal to communicate information to authorities, money laundering and providing cryptographic services to criminals."

Freedom for Everybody or for Nobody

Durov's alleged crime is offering encrypted communications services to everybody, including those who engage in illegality or just anger the powers that be. But secure communications are a feature, not a bug, for most people who live in a world in which "global freedom declined for the 18th consecutive year in 2023," according to Freedom House. Fighting authoritarian regimes requires means of exchanging information that are resistant to penetration by various repressive police agencies.

"Telegram, and other encrypted messaging services, are crucial for those intending to organise protests in countries where there is a severe crackdown on free speech. Myanmar, Belarus and Hong Kong have all seen people relying on the services," Index on Censorship noted in 2021.

And if bad people occasionally use encrypted apps such as Telegram, they use phones and postal services, too. The qualities that make communications systems useful to those battling authoritarianism are also helpful to those with less benign intentions. There's no way to offer security to one group without offering it to everybody.

Durov's Second Clash With an Authoritarian Government

A CNN report on the case (I watch so you don't have to) weirdly linked Durov to Russian President Vladimir Putin, insinuating the two are conspiring. But as Reuters helpfully points out, "Telegram, based in Dubai, was founded by Durov, who left Russia in 2014 after he refused to comply with demands to shut down opposition communities on his VK social media platform, which he has sold."

The Internet Archive contains links to 2014 posts by Durov boasting, in Russian, that he refused to surrender information about Ukrainian users of VKontakte to the Putin regime and balked at barring the late Alexei Navalny's opposition group from the service.

"I'm afraid there is no going back," Durov told TechCrunch after leaving Russia to build Telegram. "Not after I publicly refused to cooperate with the authorities. They can't stand me."

Telegram was initially blocked in Russia, but the ban was unpopular and unsuccessful, and soon dropped. The service is now widely used by both Russians and Ukrainians as a digital battleground in their war.

Given that Telegram was founded by a free speech champion who fled his home country after refusing to monitor and censor speech for the authorities, it's very easy to suspect that Pavel Durov has run afoul of authoritarians operating under a different flag, no matter the protestations of French President Emmanuel Macron that the arrest "is in no way a political decision" and that France "is deeply committed to freedom of expression and communication."

This is the same Macron, after all, who last year, after riots he insisted were coordinated online, huffed "We have to think about the social networks, about the bans we'll have to put in place. When things get out of control, we might need to be able to regulate or cut them off."

More recently, free speech groups objected to European Union threats to censor political content on X—specifically, an interview with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

The U.S. Has Its Own Free Speech Concerns

Matters are better in the United States, but not so much (as we have every right to demand). The Twitter Files and the Facebook Files revealed serious pressure brought to bear by the U.S. government on social media companies to stifle dissenting views and inconvenient (to the political class) news stories. If any further confirmation was needed, Zuckerberg sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee on August 26 regretting the company's role in succumbing to pressure to censor content.

"In 2021, senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire," Zuckerberg wrote to Chairman Jim Jordan (R–Ohio). "I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it."

Zuckerberg also admitted to suppressing reports about the incriminating contents of Hunter Biden's laptop at the FBI's behest. "We're ready to push back if something like this happens again," he promised.

Fighting a Free Speech Recession

Durov's arrest isn't an isolated incident. It comes amid what Jacob Mchangama, (founder of the Danish think tank Justitia and executive director of The Future of Free Speech) calls "a free speech recession." He warns that "liberal democracies, rather than constituting a counterweight to the authoritarian onslaught, are themselves contributing to the free-speech recession."

"Recession" might be too soft a word to describe a phenomenon that has governments attempting to suppress ideas and arresting entrepreneurs who operate neutral communications channels. These are harsh policies with real costs in terms of human freedom.

Telegram didn't respond to a request for comment, but in a public statement said, "it is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform."

In a post from March, Pavel Durov himself commented, "All large social media apps are easy targets for criticism due to the content they host." He vowed, "we shall solve any potential challenges the same way we do everything else — with efficiency, innovation and respect for privacy and freedom of speech."

Durov's arrest shows that he, like all champions of free expression, must wage their battles for liberty against the active opposition of government officials even in nominally free countries. Free speech is as important as ever, but more besieged than it has been in a long time.