Criminals do not divide the world in the same way that comms businesses, regulators and governments do. When making the initial connection in the hopes of duping somebody into handing over their life savings, crooks do not care if the connection is made by robocall, SMS, RCS, Whatsapp, Facebook, Tinder, or hundreds of other online messaging platforms and marketplaces. Their objectives and their modus operandi will be largely the same in each instance. When different business sectors work independently to mitigate scams they may not appreciate and address what these crimes have in common. Inadequate KYC is a common problem, whether it is the KYC performed by a CPaaS before sending bulk SMS messages, or the KYC that a social media platform performs to ensure a new user is a genuine person. There may also be commonalities in potential mitigations. For example, Europe seems to be increasingly oriented towards scanning content across multiple kinds of online platforms and messaging services, despite opposition from privacy activists.
Differences of opinion about when it is appropriate for the authorities to scrutinize the content of private messages will come to the fore as a consequence of France arresting Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov. The preliminary charges are that Durov allowed criminal activity to occur through Telegram’s messaging service. This may be true, but it is also true that Telegram is used by journalists and democracy activists to evade the laws imposed by some governments that European democracies consider to be oppressors of human rights. Durov previously left Russia and sold his share of a successful business just to deny the Russian government obtaining similar kinds of oversight to those now being sought by France. Modern communications are global, as is crime. However, moral expectations are not the same everywhere. French prosecutors will argue the state needs to exert control over the messages which can be conveyed using Telegram in order to protect the public. If they succeed, there will still be inconsistencies in what different countries consider morally acceptable to include in messages communicated across borders, even if every nation used the same methods for controlling communication across every different channel.
The globalization of moderation that comes with globalization of networked services means that much of the content of the web is allowed or disallowed based on the prevailing morality within the USA, because of the outsized US influence on the information technology industry. Boosters of AI have so far been blind to what this could potentially mean for national cultures if AI is used for moderation. China stands as a counterexample to US dominion because of its size, language, and the differing priorities of the Chinese Communist Party, and it is inevitable that other countries sometimes feel frustration about the import of foreign standards even when they lack the resources to override them. China also ranks as leaders in the development and export of AI. There is some irony in the fact that France is one of the European nations that most actively defends and promotes its national culture as a bulwark against foreign influence. Supporters of the arrest of Durov by the French authorities should keep in mind the consequences when individual nations try to unilaterally decide what may be communicated through global networks.
