OhOn August 24, the private jet of a Russian tech billionaire landed at Le Bourget airport, northeast of Paris, to find French judicial police officers waiting for him. He was arrested and quickly taken in for questioning. Four days later, he was charged with 12 counts, including alleged complicity in the distribution of child exploitation material and drug trafficking, banned from leaving France and placed under “judicial supervision,” requiring him to report to gendarmes twice a week until further notice.
The tycoon in question, Pavel Durov, is a tech entrepreneur who collects nationalities the way others collect airline miles. In fact, it turns out that one of their citizenships is French, generously provided in 2021 by French President Emmanuel Macron. Durov is also, it seems, a fitness fanatic with a demanding daily regimen. “After eight hours of monitored sleep,” the Financial time He reportedly “starts each day ‘without fail’ with 200 push-ups, 100 sit-ups and an ice bath. He doesn’t drink, smoke, eat sugar or meat and sets aside time to meditate.” When he’s not busy with these demanding activities, he’s also found time to father more than 100 children as a sperm donor and rival Elon Musk as a free-speech extremist.
Durov’s media profiles recall Churchill’s famous description of Russia as “an enigma wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” Durov left Russia because the Facebook clone he co-founded with his brother Nikolai in 2006 sparked a conflict with the Kremlin. He eventually moved to the United Arab Emirates, where he created Telegram, a private social media platform that is almost as mysterious as its founder.
Telegram has around 950 million regular users. It is partly a messaging system like WhatsApp, but while WhatsApp limits the number of groups to 1,024, Telegram allows up to 200,000 and in that sense is also a broadcast system like X. One-to-one communications are end-to-end encrypted only if users choose the “secret chats” option, which, since many internet users never change the default setting, actually means: According to a security expert“that the vast majority of individual Telegram conversations, and literally all group chats, are likely viewable on Telegram servers.”
Given this, what is puzzling is why there are so many bad actors on the platform. After all, rats generally abhor sunlight. But, as One critic puts it this way::“Telegram is the closest thing we have to a popularised dark web. Nearly a billion people, mostly ordinary citizens, rub shoulders with criminals, hackers, terrorists and child abusers. Despite a lack of technical security and privacy, the platform is a lure for those operating in the shadows.” And perhaps they stay because Durov doesn’t believe in content moderation. Indeed, he has sometimes boasted about how lean his operation is. Like Musk, he doesn’t believe in expensive moderation equipment. And one of the motivations believed to be behind his prosecution in France is the way his company has refused to cooperate with law enforcement investigating criminal activity on the platform.
Telegram’s finances are also a bit mysterious. Documents leaked to the Financial time Details of its operations in 2023 show it lost $173 million that year. Its business model seems confusing, consisting of rudimentary advertising, subscriptions and — wait for it — the cryptocurrency toncoin. Before Durov’s arrest, there had been talk of an initial public offering, which now seems like a pipe dream.
But all this is just background noise that masks the historic significance of Durov’s arrest in a broader context. For the past three decades, the democratic world has been preoccupied by two challenges posed by a world dominated by technology and its corporate masters. The first was the impunity seemingly conferred on tech moguls by Section 230 of the Constitution. United States Communications Decency Act of 1996which freed them from any responsibility for what appeared on their platforms. The second concerned the discrepancy between local laws and a global technology that transcended borders.
Well, just as Durov’s plane was landing at Le Bourget, a US district court judge was handing down a sentence. Historic ruling which indicates that the free ride Section 230 offers to corporations may be coming to an end. And a French legal authority pointed out to a tech mogul that while he may think he rules the world, France controls its own airspace. That’s why Musk might have to think twice about flying over Europe in the future. Long live France!
What I’m reading
Keep that thought
A thinker thinks is a charming and quirky essay by Joseph Epstein in the London Book Review On the difficult art of thinking.
After the newsletter promotion
Authority figure
Read The dangers of state powerTranscription by Yascha Mounk of her wonderful interview with the late, great anthropologist James C Scott.
Black Books
Roland Allen’s entertaining essay Moleskine-Mania: How a notebook conquered the digital age in it Walrus Look at the strange persistence of the black notebook.
Do you have any views on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words for consideration for publication, please email it to observation.letters@observer.co.uk
