America’s relationship with its European allies is under mounting stress over increasingly divergent views of online censorship, tech innovation and the best way to regulate artificial intelligence. 

In the wake of recent anti-immigrant riots, British police are locking people up over social media posts, with a British police commissioner threatening internet users beyond the U.K.’s borders who post what officials consider disinformation. France has just arrested one of the world’s best-known tech entrepreneurs in connection with whether his messaging platform was being used for child pornography and other criminal activity. And the European Union is pushing for mandatory restrictions on AI development while the American government has pursued voluntary commitments from major tech companies. 

Amb. Nathaniel C. Fick, the first-ever head of the State Department’s cyberspace bureau, finds himself in the middle of the effort to prevent such philosophical and legal fissures in tech freedom from fracturing the U.S. government’s relationship with its closest allies. 

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Asked whether Europeans share the broad American support for free speech onlilne, Mr. Fick told The Washington Times not every European nation supports the U.S. view, but that that the continent was not a monolith. 

“I think that there are EU countries that, generally, broadly, have the same free speech views that the United States has and there are some that don’t,” he said in a wide-ranging interview in his Foggy Bottom office. “There’s always this tension between individual liberty and the collective good.”

Mr. Fick directed The Times to French authorities regarding the stunning arrest of Pavel Durov, the CEO of the popular messaging app Telegram. Mr. Durov was detained by French authorities after touching down at a Paris airport in August, sending shock waves through America’s tech sector. 

Questions persist over any politics behind the prosecution and the French authorities’ motivation. although Telegram has been criticized in the past for having lower content monitoring standards than U.S. rivals such as X and because of a fear some Telegram users were using its encrypted messaging services for criminal activity. Telegram, now based in the United Arab Emirates, said after Mr. Durov’s arrest that it followed all applicable European laws and regulations.

After Mr. Durov’s detention, Alexander Vindman, a former security aide in the Trump White House, ominously warned X owner and CEO  Elon Musk that he should be nervous.

Chris Pavlovski, founder of the video-based platform Rumble, waited until departing Europe before commenting on the Telegram controversy amid uncertainty over whether he would face a similar fate. 

European nations’ digital crackdown is extending beyond issues of speech and censorship to include AI regulation and emerging technology innovation. 

The European Union’s 27-nation parliament approved the EU AI Act earlier this year, a first-of-its-kind legislation banning various AI applications involving behavior manipulation and facial recognition systems, among other things. 

Europe’s push onward with AI rules comes afteran earlier push employing a similar strategy on data privacy regulations, advancing rules before the U.S. and other nations could act and setting the de facto industry oversight standards around the world for more than five years. 

Tension has emerged between Europe seeking to impose its AI rulebook and the U.S. government urging relative restraint. At a meeting of nations in Japan last year, Mr. Fick argued against bans and strict requirements, in contrast to his European counterparts, according to Politico. 

Mr. Fick said he is not pursuing U.S. economic interests at the expense of others. He said the future will be worse if the U.S. has a thriving tech sector and its closest allies and biggest trading partners do not. Many of the EU online regulations are felt most keenly by U.S-based companies such as Google, Facebook and Apple.

“The argument that I make in Brussels all the time, it’s not, ‘Hey, you need to unshackle American tech.’ It’s ‘Hey, you need to grow some of your own, for God’s sake,’” he said. 

Mr. Fick said if the top ten AI companies in the next decade are all American, it will mean the U.S. and Europe each missed an important opportunity. 

Whichever Western policy prescription for internet freedom and technology innovation prevails, deterring malicious uses of technology by adversaries and competitors may prove an even more important task. China, Russia, Iran and others are far from guaranteed to follow America’s lead or heed its agenda.

Mr. Fick said the digital world is in a transitional period, a “sort of Wild West” where he said China has gotten away with intellectual property theft and Russia remains largely unscathed after being accused of covert election influence campaigns targeting the U.S. and allies political systems.

The U.S. is in a “20-plus year deterrence hole with [China],” he said, arguing there was an urgent need for America to dramatically ramp up digital deterrence. 

“It’s not cyber tit for cyber tat, it’s using every instrument of national power — diplomatic, yes, also economic, informational, [and] if necessary and justified, military — in order to enforce those norms that we’ve all agreed to,” he said. “I think that’s going to be a big issue for the next administration, regardless of who it is.”