Free Speech vs. Sovereignty?

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On September 4, the Washington Post Editorial Board published its position on Elon Musk’s battle with a Brazilian judge that resulted in the prohibition of X in the country. While acknowledging that Musk was not without blame in the incident and that he’s not quite the man of principles he portrays himself to be, the Post editorial board nevertheless concludes that this is “a cautionary tale for democracies that believe the answer to troublesome online expression is to suppress it.”

This is a conclusion that multiple observers came to- such as my former employer, The Economist, which ran a leader under the headline “As Brazil bans Elon Musk’s X, who will speak up for free speech?” “As speech becomes a culture-war battleground, those who disagree with the politics of Mr. Musk and his allies have become relaxed about the onslaught,” its authors observe.

But when I spoke to Brazilians and others outside the US and Europe, I found less hand-wringing over the impact of the ban on X than I did about the behavior of Elon Musk, who for many has come to represent the most extreme example of a billionaire in control of an American tech firm who refuses to answer to any laws.

That’s when I came across a post from Paris Marx, a Canadian tech critic, under the headline "Pavel Durov and Elon Musk are not free speech champions: The actions against Telegram and Twitter/X are about sovereignty, not speech." On Friday, I spoke to Paris about his assessment of these matters, and why those making claims in defense of free speech in the wake of Brazil’s ban on X and Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov’s arrest in France may in fact be undermining free expression and internet freedoms in the long run.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the episode.

Paris Marx:

My name is Paris Marx. I host the Tech Won't Save Us Podcast. I also write a newsletter called Disconnect.

Justin Hendrix:

I know you've been writing about tech for about 10 years. In a recent post, you admit you didn't come to tech as a critic, but you've arrived at this point of view over time.

Paris Marx:

When I initially got interested in tech, I was like an Apple fanboy. I was very excited about what tech could be. My politics are obviously on the left, so in the 2010s I was very interested in things like fully automated luxury communism and those sorts of ideas like how can we use technology to eliminate work and all this sort of stuff. But then seeing what happened in the 2010s in particular, as I was more coming of age and whatnot, it was really on the one hand seeing the way that the gig economy grew and a lot of the narratives that formed the basis of that industry around the freedom and the opportunity it was going to offer to people. But then seeing the reality of how those companies operate and what those companies actually did to workers and the precarity that it forced on them, the way that they have campaigned endlessly to decimate labor rights and to carve workers out of employment classifications to make them independent contractors.

And then the other piece of that which feels very relevant to today, seeing a lot of the arguments around robots and AI are going to take all of our jobs in the mid 2010s when we were talking about self-driving cars and potential improvements to robotics and all this kind of stuff, and that prompting this big discussion around we need a basic income to provide for everybody because up to half of jobs are going to be quickly wiped out and all this kind of stuff. And then seeing that didn't actually happen. We didn't have this mass elimination of work that the tech industry and a lot of academics who are very wrapped up in it were predicting. And instead what we saw was these companies, I think, use that fear to a certain degree, but also use algorithmic management and new digital technologies in order to further reduce the power of workers within the workplace to increase the power of management.

And then the impacts that has had looking at the gig economy or looking at, say, the Amazon model of labor and what it has done in its warehouses and delivery service and things like that. And then how other companies within the economy have had to respond to that and the real effects that has had.

So when I think about my approach to tech criticism, it has really been shaped in particular by watching those events, watching that evolution, then going back and reading some of the longer term history of how these technologies developed, the impacts in previous times and then seeing that we're promised all these things by the tech industry. These billionaires have gotten very wealthy and very powerful as a result, but I don't see the tangible benefits that they promised us for a very long time. Yes, there have been benefits from the internet, but I think that they have made a lot more promises than they've been able to deliver on. And actually, the more and more we go down this track of internet revolution and the rollout of digital technology, the benefits become fewer and fewer, the harms that we are all subjected to become greater and greater. And so that's kind of where I come from.

Justin Hendrix:

But Paris, I was told abundance is around the corner’ And so the kind of communist utopia, whatever you might like to call it, the life of leisure is almost here.

Paris Marx:

One of the things that really stood out to me when I was reading about this in the 2010s was seeing how John Maynard Keynes a hundred years ago predicted that we would have 15 hour work weeks by around now and seeing how we definitely do not have that and actually what we're seeing is a lot of people having to work more and more because their wages have been decimated because cost of living keeps increasing and we certainly have not gotten, I think, the benefits that were supposed to come of all this technological innovation and the productivity that it was going to deliver and all this kind stuff. Instead, things really suck for a lot of people still.

Justin Hendrix:

I brought you on this podcast to talk about a set of incidents that kind of occurred in such close proximity that observers like yourself, myself, we've not been able to not talk about them together in tandem. The case of Pavel Durov arrested at an airport just outside Paris, August 24th, and of course this ban that Brazil has levied on Elon Musk's X. You've written about these things under the headline, Pavel Durov and Elon Musk are Not Free Speech Champions. The Actions Against Telegram and Twitter/X are About Sovereignty, Not Speech. Give us a starting point. Where do you start from when it comes to this argument?

Paris Marx:

Unsurprisingly, when this arrest happened of Pavel Durov and when Twitter/X was suspended in Brazil, immediately the response, because it is the general response that I think that we tend to have when we talk about technology, is to say, "Oh, this is a big threat to free speech. What is this going to mean?" especially because of how people like Elon Musk have weaponized this term of free speech recently, but also because of how this concept of speech is really core to the internet politics that have developed over the past few decades. And so naturally when this happened, all of a sudden people started talking about speech again.

I think that obviously there are moments when we can talk about speech. There are often implications for speech when we talk about things that happen online. But it seemed very clear to me that when it came to these two cases, we were talking much more about sovereignty than about speech with what was happening here. And that by positioning it through this brain and through this lens of speech, once again, was distracting us from the real things that we should be talking about in relation to these cases. And increasingly how this plays into, I think, how we are going to see discussions around internet politics and really are already seeing these discussions evolve as this hegemony of the United States and these ideas that emerge from the United States about what the internet should be, how it should act, how its companies should be allowed to operate around the rest of the world are really being challenged as other countries rise and as the power of the United States to tell everyone else what to do has diminished.

Justin Hendrix:

And know that the Brazilians I've talked to in particular have complicated views on this. They're not totally happy with how things have gone down. Many of them are, other journalists that I know there, devastated that they aren't able to use X, at least not legally, that they've lost those networks, et cetera. And yet they still think the government has done the right thing.

Paris Marx:

I think it's really fascinating to see how that has played out. I agree to you, I've seen those mixed views by a lot of Brazilians, but ultimately siding on the side of, "Yeah, this makes total sense that they have done this." But I would say to you that if something like this had happened two years ago, say before Elon Musk bought Twitter, we would be having a very different conversation now because I think a lot of the people who are okay that this happened because there's so much hatred toward Elon Musk now would have been fuming at the idea that this could happen a couple of years ago to a social media platform. And I have found that really interesting to watch as well.

Justin Hendrix:

So I want to bring in a perspective from The Economist, which I think is a perspective counter to yours, but they make that argument essentially that speech is a culture war battle or ground, that those who disagree with the politics of Mr. Musk and his allies have become relaxed about the onslaught. Is that what's happened to me? Am I relaxed about the onslaught because I disagree with the politics of Mr. Musk?

Paris Marx:

I don't think necessarily. No. And I think that there are two different discussions happening there that are probably necessary to tease out when we have these discussions around speech because there's one that finds its roots in the kind of cyber libertarian digital rights politics that we've been talking about for a long time online that really doesn't want to see kind of government regulation of these platforms and is really wary of the role that government can play when it comes to the internet and internet politics and platforms and stuff like that. And there might be a discomfort with the way that the billionaires are running the platforms, but ultimately there's also a significant discomfort with government getting involved there.

But then on the other hand, we have this framing of free speech that has been around for quite a long time but has really seen a resurgence, I think it's fair to say, in the past few years, this right-wing interpretation of free speech that is being used in these kind of culture war arguments that we're seeing a lot of lately where anything that restricts the ability of the right-wing to get their message out is treated as and targeted as a free speech issue, right? And this is in particular what Elon Musk is talking about when he uses free speech.

And so I think not to say that the Economist necessarily is running with all these right-wing culture war arguments, I'm sure they are publishing stuff about it, but I would say that framing, not having read the article, is probably more in that camp of things. Not necessarily saying that it's supporting the far right and doing this stuff, but that framing of free speech has become very common in these sorts of discussions or in these sorts of op-eds and whatnot in trying to make sure that there's not this kind of regulation and these expectations that are placed on these platforms because it's perceived to be this speech issue when really we know that Elon Musk is happy to take certain things off of the platform, whether it's governments asking him to or things that he doesn't personally like, but really wants to make sure that this is a space where a lot of right-wing voices can say whatever they want without feeling any degree of accountability or that they could be held to account for those things that they will be suspended, that they will have impacts on their accounts.

And his decision to have done that has also given permission to a lot of other social media platforms like the Facebooks and things like that to also reduce the previous content moderation that they had around these sorts of right-wing issues and hate speech and things like that where we've seen some of that being relaxed in recent months as well.

Justin Hendrix:

It seems to me in the case of both Durov and Musk, we're not talking about just political speech. We're talking about, in Durov's case, it sounds like the main offense was really around crimes, and we're talking about crimes against children that apparently the platform decided not to address. That one seems maybe even more clear cut to me than the situation in Brazil. But Musk also, we're talking about defending accounts which were used to essentially attack democracy and potentially played some role in the onslaught in Brasilia against the seat of government there on January 8th, the 2023.

What do you think we can learn from this going forward? The slippery slope argument is the thing that I hear the most, is, if we start doing the sort of thing or we start banning certain applications or banning certain platforms, that just sends a message, right? That's the way to handle our problems. That's the way we'll sort this out in democracies, then that sends a signal to the autocrats or the would-be autocrats all over the world that, "Hey, this is something we're all doing."

Paris Marx:

Yeah, I'm not very worried about that argument because I think that autocrats have already been quite open about restricting these platforms, shutting down the internet and whatnot whenever they have wanted to do that and they felt that it's been beneficial to them, right? So I'm not particularly scared of that argument because that's something that autocratic governments have already been doing.

As I mentioned, and as I think has been noted many times, Elon Musk has been happy to respect requests from the Indian government, from the Turkish government, from the Emirati government, I understand, to suspend people to take things off of Twitter because they didn't like what was happening there and Musk was fine to do that. But in this case, as you mentioned, the enforcement that the Brazilian government wanted was against these people who are on the extreme right, who are far right-wing activists and who were potentially or allegedly involved in this attempted coup that happened in Brasilia in 2023.

And so in that case, he was not willing to basically go ahead with what the Supreme Court wanted him to do in removing these accounts from the platform and suspending them, right? And that is ultimately what has gotten us to this place after a series of requests from the Supreme Court and Twitter/X and Elon Musk refusing to carry through with those things.

So in this case, what we have is two Democratic governments, Brazil and France, basically taking action against platforms that were in violation of the rules that they have set up and the expectations that they have for how these platforms should operate within their borders. And I don't see any problem with that. As I said, I think that there would've been people who would be a lot more angry with the banning or with the suspension of Twitter/X if Elon Musk was not in control of it than have been. I think if they had done that, the Facebook, we would've had a very different conversation now.

Again, I'm not really that worried about that if those platforms are in violations of the expectations that democratic governments are setting up for them. I think in the Durov case, as you say, I think that's much more clear cut. What we have is Telegram, more of a messaging platform, but it also can be used to disseminate messages through its groups where the French authorities as reporting in Politico, and I'm sure a number of French media organizations have shown, really found that there was not just the criminal activity happening on there, but in particular that this investigation that led to the arrest of Pavel Durov of was really focused on child crimes and on finding that there were people on the platform having real evidence of this where they were basically talking to children, trying to get them to take images of themselves and to share them with these people, sharing those images around amongst themselves, talking to themselves, talking to each other about their exploits against these children and the government and the authorities who were led this investigation going to Telegram and saying, "Please, can you take action against these things?" and Telegram not doing so.

And up until recently, they even bragged about the fact that they would not follow these requests on its website. So I'm really not concerned about the fact that someone like Pavel Durov was getting arrested for this when he's completely not done the very reasonable thing that most platforms do in working with authorities on these sorts of questions.

I think it does present some difficult questions for some people within these traditional internet politics movements, digital rights movements, cyber libertarian movements, especially when we talk about encryption, right? Because a lot of the argument is, we should allow these messaging apps, these encrypted messaging apps to let anybody use them even if it is the criminals and the child predators and what have you.

And I think that the more that these kinds of discussions move into the light and we start to have them much more publicly, I think that those things get a bit more difficult to defend. And I think that is part of the reason why a lot of the focus from these sorts of people who have these sorts of views is the concern about the arrest of Pavel Durov and one of the charges being under this French law, I think, from 2003 or 2004 that surrounds encryption and not the other pieces of this case, which they don't seem to want to talk about very much.

Justin Hendrix:

It's my understanding as well that in some ways, the kind of really truly under underlying aspect of the Durov situation is not about encryption really. That's there. I remain somewhat concerned about that, about the inclusion of that. But I wanted to ask you about another piece of this which always occurs to me, which is, we're also talking about billionaires here, these guys who jet set round and hang out with world leaders, Durov, there's been lots of headlines about his close relationship with French president Emmanuel Macron. We've got Elon Musk cozied up to Donald Trump at the moment and eyeing a position potentially in his cabinet. These aren't just business owners or publishers somehow. These are men with extraordinary means. And in Musk's case, he's not just a kind of platform owner, he's also an internet connectivity provider, he's also a defense contractor, he is also a transportation entrepreneur, a space travel entrepreneur. There's a lot going on here, but what about this has to do with just the scale of these men's wealth?

Paris Marx:

Yeah, it's huge, right? Obviously, Pavel Durov is someone with a lot of influence and wealth as well, someone who is less known to the general public as Elon Musk. He fled Russia in 2004 as a previous co-founder of VKontakte, which is a major social media platform in Russia and in Russian-speaking countries, but gave up his Russian citizenship and then obtained Emirati citizenship, again, I assume because the government there thought that he would be beneficial to the tech industry in the Emirates, but also in France. And Emmanuel Macron has admitted that he gave citizenship to Durov as part of this broader push to attract tech investment and attract the tech industry. I think it was in 2018 when he received that citizenship or somewhere around then.

We've seen obviously Peter Thiel buy citizenship in New Zealand. There have been stories about tech people being interested in getting citizenships in other countries like New Zealand. Peter Thiel has also looked at buying citizenship in Malta, for example. And we know that Elon Musk obviously is incredibly powerful. He's one of the richest men in the world, but also controls these very huge and very influential companies such that he's building relationships with right-wing movements around the world and using his platform and his influence even beyond Twitter to try to boost these sorts of movements, whether it is the Hungarian government and their influence in their politics within the European Union. He's very close with Italy's far-right prime minister. He's tweeted positive things about alternative for Deutschland in Germany, which is obviously a far-right party there that is gaining further support and is very anti-migrant. And as you say, he's very close to Donald Trump and there's many other that I could name, right?

But we also know that there are growing concerns about his influence within the United States and within the US government. There have been stories in the past few years about how dependent the Ukrainian campaign and what the United States was doing there was on Starlink and his control of this internet infrastructure. Also, of course, how the US's ability to get astronauts or anything else to space now is very much dependent on SpaceX, right? And we saw that recently with the disaster of the Boeing Starliner and how SpaceX has had to come to the rescue. So in so many different areas, Elon Musk is essential, and this gives him even more power than what a regular billionaire would have because he has so much command over these infrastructures.

And that presents a lot of concern when you think about trying to rein someone like that in. We have seen time and again that the US government has not been able to do that with Elon Musk, that he regularly flouts rules and regulations, whether it's environmental rules, labor rules, other things like that. He's even currently trying to destroy and dismantle and have the National Labor Relations Board declared unconstitutional. SpaceX is currently suing about this right now with some other companies and is something that Donald Trump and that the Republican Party says that they would support if they return to government.

And so there are massive threats that come of this. And so when you think about that, when you put that in the broader perspective, it makes sense that governments around the world should be doing what they can to try to rein these companies and rein these billionaires in even if it is beyond the American experience. There are a lot of governments that are unwilling to try to do that. But in the cases where governments are, I think that they deserve our support because these people do need to be reined in if we want any control, not just over the technologies that are being developed and deployed in our societies, the direction of our society and our world more generally.

Justin Hendrix:

So we've got these oligarchs who essentially have the kind of control over most of the major platforms. I'd throw Mark Zuckerberg in there as well along the same lines. And this is a week for him where apparently on another podcast that I'm sure has many more listeners than this one, he has said he will no longer apologize for any of the various things that his platform is blamed for. He thinks he's been blamed a bit too much for society's ills.

Paris Marx:

If anyone has benefited most from the turn against Elon Musk, it's Mark Zuckerberg who does a lot of very harmful things and his platform still have a lot of negative impacts in the world. But he's been able to rebrand himself. People are flocking to his platforms again as the alternative to Twitter. It's incredible to see how he has benefited from this and just the short memories that a lot of people have about this man.

Justin Hendrix:

One of the things that occurs to me is that to some extent, the free speech argument in the US, we hold it so dear, but I almost wonder that it's just holding us back at this point from recognizing that there might be something more dangerous than a democratic government banning an app, which is unaccountable corporate power in Silicon Valley, which we have in this country, I'm speaking to you from New York, you're in the more genteel Canada, we have essentially failed to do much to rein Silicon Valley in, failed to do much to address any of the harms of these platforms. It feels to me like that's more likely to have created the conditions in which other governments feel they must confront these people than some sort of insidious, authoritarian bent in places like Brazil. We want to look out there and say, "Oh, it's creeping autocracy." But perhaps we should, I don't know, look at our own circumstances.

Paris Marx:

Yeah. I think that's a really astute observation. And I think I would say two things about it, right? One from the American perspective and one from beyond. In the American perspective, I can understand where these ideas come from, right? I would assume, I would argue that the United States has a stronger kind of libertarian bent to it than a lot of other Western countries. This kind of concern or worry about the power of the government, a belief that the government is probably not doing a whole lot of things that are beneficial to the wider public, whereas in other Western countries, we have these large welfare states and support programs that don't exist to the same degree in the United States.

But also I think that this concern about government is just stronger in the US, so you can see where the roots of this perspective that has shaped internet politics in the United States and beyond has really come from there. And of course, the interpretation of free speech through the First Amendment is, I would argue, quite distinct in the United States versus a lot of other Western countries.

And so you can see how that evolves and shapes the way that people think about the internet, think about the way to approach it. But then as the tech industry grows, initially, it is an industry that's not very powerful that's taking on these traditional companies that are very large and I can see the incentive then to want to say, "Okay, tech companies should be able to ignore copyrights and scan everyone's books and all this kind of stuff to do whatever they want and they should not be held to account for these things."

And there are many ways that I think that this kind of digital rights industry has argued to allow tech industries to get around traditional rules that might have existed for other companies treating digital technology as though it was separate from traditional regulations, other kinds of industries. And now we reach the point where these are some of the biggest companies in the world and they have this history, this expectation that they are going to get away with ignoring the rules. And in some cases, these arguments are still applied to some of the largest and most powerful companies in the world, for example, with generative AI, where a lot of digital rights groups still argue that they should be able to scrape the web and take any content that they want to change to train their models story, and that should just be acceptable, right?

So I think that is a concern, and that is part of the reason that their power is the way it is, certainly not exclusively. They had a lot of assistance from government to get to where they are, and this is the way that capitalism works to allow these companies to become as huge and powerful as they are. But I think that there has been a shift in the digital rights movement to recognizing the power of these companies and wanting to push back on it, but I would argue it has not gone far enough because speech is still so central to the way that these things are observed and understood and analyzed.

But then the other piece of that from outside of the United States is to look at it and say, "We do not have this same way of viewing free speech in our countries." Often it's framed very differently and there's an expectation that you have free speech, but the government has the ability to put in rules that limit free speech to protect everybody else and to protect that right, which is not always interpreted the same in the United States. But then on top of that, we also have the experience of these major tech companies came from the United States, the US privatized the internet, its companies got a leg up on developing themselves and monopolizing these markets and then going global. So we have had a couple decades now of basically being under the foot of these American companies and constantly being told whether it's by digital rights groups or by the American government and its ambassadors and diplomats and things that we can't regulate its companies, that we can't try to rein them in or else either the US government will be mad at us or it's a violation of people's rights.

And I think that people outside the United States are getting a bit fed up with those arguments, and that is part of the reason why we're increasingly having this shift where the harms have just reached a level where people are not willing to put up with them anymore. And of course, the European Union has moved on this much earlier in part because they want to try to develop their own competitors and have economic advantages that come with that. But I think more and more, whether it's Australia or Canada or what you're seeing in Brazil or other countries, this kind of norm that we've had for the past couple years is eroding and we're going to have a different kind of internet politics that's going to come from that's not going to be so shaped from the American environment, and I welcome that discussion and seeing what that's going to look like.

Justin Hendrix:

I do want to just pick out a couple of pieces of your article here and ask you about them in particular though. I think a reasonable reader might get rubbed the wrong way, right? So there's this bit about China. You talk about the idea that the great firewall is not just a kind of censorship measure, not just a means to keep Chinese internet users within a cultural and censorship kind of container, but it's also a way of creating a competitive space vis-a-vis Silicon Valley. Are you defending the Chinese great firewall? Are you defending the Chinese model here?

Paris Marx:

This is where it becomes difficult, right? Because I would say no, I'm not defending it inherently, but I can understand the desire to want to adopt a policy like this not in the censorship sense, which we still see in the Chinese government's attempts, and not even attempts, but what they actually do to restrict what Chinese citizens can say online, what they can see online, what they can learn, what they can post, all these sorts of things. I don't agree with that, and I think that that is a problem and is not something that should be done.

But on top of that, I can understand the desire to want to create a policy that limits the degree to which international and particularly American tech companies can operate within one's country, especially at the stage that China did it because like I was talking about before, other western countries and many other countries around the world did not put limitations on the way that American companies could act in which American companies could operate within their jurisdictions. And as a result, it was very difficult to develop domestic competitors to those companies. The Amazons, Googles, Microsofts, Facebooks of the world were able to just roll over and dominate the internet markets in these countries. And I think that is part of where some of the resentment that is happening today comes from, right? The European Union wants to develop its own domestic competitors, many other countries do as well, and that this is at the root of that.

And if we look at China, yes, the censorship part was bad, but this is traditional economic policy, right, to protect your industry as it is developing, as it is nascent so it can properly grow to reach the point where it can be competitive internationally. And then you start to take those things away and allow those companies to go global, right? And that is what we've seen in China, where China has been able to present the biggest kind of competition or challenge to Silicon Valley globally its tech companies have because it took that policy and was able to give its domestic tech companies the space that they needed to develop, to innovate, to reach the point that they're at today.

And the final thing I would add there is, again, this is not like a novel thing, right? It feels novel in the sense of the internet because so few other countries have even tried to do something like this, but this is the way that things worked with industries in the past. Germany protected its car industry and was able to develop it so it could become competitive, and the United States actually let it do that. Same with South Korea and Japan. After World War II, they protected their electronics industries and their automotives industries. Again, the United States was an ally in those moments and it allowed those countries to do that so that it could build up those industries. And then of course, they became globally competitive to a degree that the United States started to actually get angry in the '70s and '80s because the Japanese cars were starting to take over the American market.

This is not an entirely novel thing, but because it happens in the internet era and because this involves communications technologies as well as other forms of technologies when it comes to the internet, this intersects with these kind of speech and privacy conversations that we have as well, which is why when the Great Firewall was launched and a lot of the discussion that we had about it ended up being around the censorship component and not around the economic component. And the unfortunate thing is that because these are communications technologies in part, these things get wrapped up together. And so I'm not advocating for censorship, I don't believe in that, but I can understand why the Chinese took a policy that restricted the ability of American tech companies to operate in China because if they had not, I don't think we'd be seeing the WeChat and the TikToks and things like that today.

Justin Hendrix:

Let me try to draw a line under this. What I understand is what you're trying to do is sort of reclaim some of that original idea about internet freedom away from Silicon Valley or away from the oligarchs who have come to control it so that there are alternatives to things like the Chinese model.

Paris Marx:

Yeah, definitely. If you think about it didn't always work this way in the United States, there was some of it, but especially in other Western countries, we have traditions of having regulations on what is shown on television or on cable networks or things like that. We have traditions of investing in public broadcasters and having certain rules around who can own media companies within our countries, right? This is even something that exists in the United States. There are discussions right now about the sale of Paramount and how there was a discussion about Sony potentially buying it, but because Sony is a foreign company, it would've faced regulatory scrutiny because it would've been buying a broadcast network, which is not allowed.

Justin Hendrix:

And let's not even talk about TikTok.

Paris Marx:

Yeah, exactly. And it's interesting on TikTok because for a long time the United States went around the world and it said, "You cannot restrict the ability of internet companies to operate in your markets because then you're going against trade rules, you're going against these free trade agreements that we want to sign with you. This is not allowed." But now that the United States and Silicon Valley, the United States tech industry is becoming threatened by international competition, all of a sudden it is adopting these measures that at long said other countries cannot do with the CHIPS act, with banning TikTok and things like that. China did it anyway, and that is what allowed it to build the tech industry that it has today. But I think that the United States turn in adopting some of these measures is also part of the reason that other countries are saying, "The United States isn't even following its own rules anymore that it told us we have to follow, so why should we?" and just allow their companies to continue operating in ways that we deem are not acceptable in our markets.

Justin Hendrix:

What you're basically trying to argue is, "Hey folks, other people have interest, other people have laws. Perhaps we should allow them in their democratic context to impose those laws. And in the long run, maybe doing that might be better for free expression for everybody."

Paris Marx:

I hope so. But I think that there are other benefits beyond free expression as well, right? And I think that as we were talking about that, how free speech works in different countries is viewed differently in different places. Some countries are not as accepting of hate speech being posted and being uttered in their societies as say the United States might be. And if they have problems with that and it's in accordance with their laws and their norms and their expectations, why should views that originate in the United States be saying that is not something that is completely acceptable.

When we move into countries that are more authoritarian that want to crack down on these things, then those discussions become a bit more difficult and become more nuanced. But when we're in a democratic context, when lawmakers have been elected by the public and are following through on the laws that they have, as we're seeing in France and as we're seeing in Brazil, and as we're beginning to see in more places like Australia, like Canada, like other countries that are moving forward with these regulations, I don't think it's up to a particular understanding of the internet that emerges from a lot of American interest and American ideas how these things should operate to go against and try to stop what those countries are ultimately trying to do.

I think that they have a legitimate case to try to make the internet work in a different way in their jurisdictions. And I think that this is going to present a really interesting next few years in the debates that we have around internet politics and what the internet is going to look like because we talk a lot about how we want to break up these big companies, and that could potentially mean there will be a lot of different competitors or alternatives, and we might be able to try different things online that often relies on antitrust investigations in the United States or something like that. This is a different way to try to build a different kind of internet that actually says the power is not just in the United States to make these changes, but different countries can try different things, and that might yield some really interesting results.

Justin Hendrix:

So I think one of the reasons I'm somewhat drawn to the general thrust of your argument is that I almost see this as a kind of last chance as AI comes along and as these companies consolidate power, it feels like to me this is a kind of last chance to get some of the stuff and maybe create the context for there to be alternatives that may have to come from someplace other than Silicon Valley.

Paris Marx:

Yeah, definitely. I think that we need to be more open to the conversation that the state is going to have a role in shaping what that's going to look like, right? The government has always been involved in the internet from the very beginning. It literally funded the creation of the thing. And even when we talked about this period after its privatization when we wanted the government to be nowhere near it, we don't restrict what we're doing online, the government was always present, right? It was always there. But now we're seeing the way that happens and the way that the government engages in it changing. And I hope that we can make sure that those regulations are in service of the publics of the countries where those governments are approaching these different regulations, that we stop letting these very powerful companies get away with what they've been getting away with because clearly they are breaching a lot of the expectations that we have for how they should be operating in our societies.

And I think that we should also be open to, and whether the United States wants to do this or not, but at least outside the United States, pushing our government to also think about what role they could play in funding public technologies, funding public platforms, and experimenting with that side of things as well. In recent years, we've been talking a lot about Macedon as an alternative to social media platforms and decentralization. Sometimes that was through the lens of weird crypto projects. But I think that there's a world where we can think about platforms, public platforms that are funded that operate really well within different jurisdictions, but that connect to this kind of broader web that could actually be really exciting to start to think about and start to wonder about how that could work fitting into these histories that a lot of our countries have with public media, with public broadcasting, and all these sorts of ideas. And I think that there's a really rich history to start to delve into there and to start to bring to the internet era in a way that has felt off limits for far too long.

Justin Hendrix:

Seems to me that free expression, free speech, a better tech future might exist if we have European alternatives and Brazilian alternatives and African alternatives and Indian alternatives and Mexican alternatives to some of the stuff we're seeing out of Silicon Valley. On the other hand, I worry that perhaps this enthusiasm that the both of us are demonstrating on this conversation for digital sovereignty, we'll have to see how it played it out. We'll have to see what happens over the next few years if in fact it can be a path towards having our cake and eating it too. Getting back to those original ideas about internet freedom, the original promise of tech, and not at the end of the day enabling autocrats.

Paris Marx:

Oh, definitely. Either way, there are going to be fights here, right? And I don't think we should just assume that because we're going to do something differently, that everything is going to be positive and everything is going to be great, right? It always takes fights. It always requires us trying to make sure that things are going to work out positively in the end. I think that there are always going to be difficulties in authoritarian countries where authoritarian governments are operating, especially in ones where those authoritarian governments have the backings of a lot of Western countries to be doing what they're doing. And I think that there will always be a difficulty there for activists who will want to be trying to find a space where they can do this work, whether we're dominated by the large Facebooks and Twitters of the world, or we have a more kind of national and decentralized way of approaching social media and online communications.

So it doesn't mean that everything's going to be fantastic and wonderful, and we're going to be moving into this utopian land of the internet if we just take on what's already there at the moment. But I do think there's an opportunity for us to start to think about things differently, to start to try different things instead of all being on these major platforms. And part of that also requires us to remember that not everybody online can code is interested in knowing about the technical foundations of things. And so these projects that we try to create always need to bring along the wider public instead of being focused on niche concerns of very kind of tech-savvy people.

Justin Hendrix:

Paris Marx, thank you very much. And let's hold ourselves to account. Let's reconvene at some point the next few years and talk about whether we were right or wrong about this particular question, looking back hopefully with not too many more incidents like we've seen over the last few weeks. I don't think either of us are advocating for more arrests or more bans. That's not what we want to see, but hopefully we can come back together and see how it's panned out.

Paris Marx:

Yeah. Hopefully, the tech billionaires will start following the rules and we won't have to do that. But yeah, I would love to talk again. Thanks so much.