Elon Musk was scheduled to sit for an interview with the Paris prosecutor on Monday. He did not appear. Linda Yaccarino, X's chief executive officer, also did not appear. The Paris prosecutor's office told reporters in the afternoon that the no-show is "not an obstacle" to continuing the probe, which encompasses algorithm manipulation, fraudulent data extraction, CSAM complicity, and Holocaust-denial counts. [1]

This followed the paper's Saturday account of the Justice Department's letter refusing to assist the French investigation, transmitted on letterhead from the Office of International Affairs and reviewed by the Wall Street Journal. The refusal held four days. No second European jurisdiction — Germany, Ireland, Belgium, the European Commission, none of them — has filed a counter-request or joined the French criminal complaint. [2] Reporters Without Borders filed a new, parallel complaint against X on Monday in Paris; that is a civil-society move, not a jurisdictional one. [3]

One notes, without great surprise, that Mr Musk has found himself a precedent. The sitting chief executive of an American platform can decline a French criminal summons backed by the Justice Department, and four days in, no European government has done anything about it. The American First Amendment, which the French prosecutor's office does not recognise as binding on its citizens or its servers, is now operational as an extradition-prevention mechanism for at least this one American. [4]

Whether the precedent survives a second jurisdiction is the test the week has left open. Paris has the complaint; Brussels has the Digital Services Act; Dublin has the Irish Data Protection Commission; Berlin has the Network Enforcement Act. None of them has moved. The silence, on the Continental side, is the story.

-- CHARLES ASHFORD, London