Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you

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**Nilay Patel** (0:38)
Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, we've got the first of a two-part series on the systems that run the world. I'm talking with Bart Butler, the CTO of Proton, a company that makes private and secure productivity software. You probably know it best for Proton Mail, which is encrypted by default, but the company also has Docs, Sheets, Calendar, even a new AI assistant called Lumo, all built and marketed around the idea that they should be vastly more private than the similar products from big tech companies. You'll hear Bart say pretty plainly that the thing Proton sells at a high level isn't really the products themselves, but actually trust. And trust in the software world isn't only about the people who run the companies, but also the technology they develop and sell, and the corporate structures in place to make sure that technology is built against the right incentives. This is pure Decoder bait, in other words. The challenge is that Bart also says Proton's mission is very much to succeed at being a viable competitor to big tech. And that means the company has to grow and expand to competitive scale, while preserving its core values. That philosophy and that challenge are linked directly into Proton's structure, and even its physical location. The company and its servers are based primarily in Switzerland, in part because of the Swiss government's geopolitical neutrality. Two years ago, Proton also transitioned to a non-profit structure governed by a foundation, which is a familiar model used by all kinds of companies that ostensibly operate in the public interest, but which has failure modes of its own, as we just saw with OpenAI.
Bart and I talked about all of that, of course, but I really wanted to talk to him because he's responsible for the technical construction of some very complex systems that interact with all of those complex politics. I really wanted to know how Bart translates all of those lofty ideals and concepts like user trust into real privacy-centric products and features that can withstand all of this policy pressure. Of course, there are real examples of this. Earlier this year, the Swiss government came knocking on Proton's door with a request for payment data to help the FBI unmask a protester associated with the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, Georgia.
Proton complied. They gave the Swiss government that data, which then went to the FBI.
Of course, I had to ask Bart about all of that and what it means that the US government can use words like terrorism to coerce foreign governments to apply pressure on Proton and how Proton decides when and how to take on those fights. This pressure manifests in all kinds of ways. Proton is on the record saying it would leave Switzerland and also consider ditching its operations in EU countries like Germany and Norway, if the various surveillance laws in those states continue to threaten Proton's privacy mission. Bart told me that these aren't just empty threats and that Proton is in the process of figuring out what it would mean to leave Europe if things get, in his words, more dystopian. There's a lot going on in this episode. We actually ran long because we got so deep into the weeds. We first spent time talking out the broad frameworks the Proton uses before talking about the real problems of child safety, age verification and AI, all of which are testing Proton's values with some of the highest stakes problems on the Internet today. But we took the extra time to get there, and I hope you'll think it's worth it. Okay, Bart Butler, the CTO of Proton. Here we go.
Bart Butler, you're the Chief Technology Officer at Proton. Welcome to Decoder.

**Bart Butler** (4:05)
Thank you, happy to be here.

**Nilay Patel** (4:07)
I'm excited to talk to you. It feels like Proton sits at the center of an escalating, spiraling debate about how we build technology systems, how we regulate them, and how consumers can protect their data or have any control at all over their data at the center of it. Let's start at the very start. I think most people understand Proton as Proton Mail, but there's now a suite of office products, of productivity products. Describe what Proton is and how you see all the products working together.