Telegram founder's arrest supercharges online freedom debate

PARIS

By arresting Russia-born billionaire tech founder Pavel Durov, French police have dived headlong into a fractious debate on free speech online that could have global ramifications.

Durov, founder of hugely popular messaging service Telegram, was picked up on Aug. 24 evening and is being accused of failing to stop various kinds of criminality on his platform.

Telegram was swift to condemn the move, calling it "absurd" to hold him personally responsible for abuse of the platform.

The company has been joined in a chorus of outrage led by industry titan and self-styled free speech absolutist Elon Musk.

But others have pointed out that Durov, one of the world's most influential tech bosses, may well have brought scrutiny on to himself.

"Crime and hate speech have proliferated on Telegram, but Durov has been incredibly uncooperative," Marc Owen Jones, Associate Professor at Northwestern University in Qatar, told AFP.

"Had he been more cooperative, it's unlikely he'd be in this situation."

He suggested Musk might be worried because he has a history of refusing to cooperate and even goading officials on his platform, X.

The arrest has highlighted a broader trend among lawmakers and law enforcement of being less tolerant of special pleading from tech bosses.

The EU's Digital Services Act (DSA) is eroding the logic that companies are not responsible for content by forcing platforms to police what their users do, or face stiff penalties.

Britain, the United States and the European Union are also all touting laws that would force services like Telegram to create backdoors into encrypted messages.

Governments claim they must have this kind of access to investigate criminal behavior and often frame it as a battle against child sexual exploitation.

But free-speech advocates have lined up alongside to oppose these moves.

Australian researcher Timothy Koskie wrote on The Conversation website that Durov's arrest marked "another act in the often confusing and contradictory negotiation of how much responsibility platforms shoulder for the content on their site."

If Durov were to be convicted, he wrote, it could "embolden nations around the world... to undertake their own investigations."

But Florence G'sell from the University of Lorraine in France suggested the debate was really about the level of privacy we want when using messaging services.

"Do we want a total level of protection against any surveillance?" she said.

"Or do we lift the encryption and force the companies to give data to the authorities."

The irony of Durov's arrest is that, on his own telling, he was forced to flee Russia in 2014 when he was snared in a very similar debate.

He claims the Russian secret services told him to hand over data on various anti-Kremlin groups.

When he refused, he was threatened and eventually forced to cede control of VKontakte, another social network he founded.