Now that France has charged Telegram’s founder with failing to prevent illegal activity on his platform, other tech giants may have reason to consider the wisdom of moving to Europe themselves.
Russian-born Pavel Durov is accused of “complicity” in running an online platform that allowed illegal transactions, child sexual abuse images and other illegal content.
French lawyers told AFP it was “unprecedented” for an individual to be held criminally liable for actions taken by users on a tech platform.
Experts told AFP that chat apps such as Telegram – which claims to have more than 900 million users – were almost certainly hosting illegal content, whether their owners were aware of it or not.
“It’s clear that if they take this case against Pavel Durov to the end, any other platform could face similar threats,” lawyer Guillaume Martin told AFP.
However, the idea of X boss Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, whose Meta group includes Facebook and WhatsApp, being arrested in Europe remained outside the realm of possibility.
“I would be very surprised if any EU member state, including France, arrested Elon Musk under similar charges,” Jan Penfrat of the European Digital Rights (EDRi) advocacy group told AFP.
“But then again, I was also surprised that they arrested Durov.”
‘Limited cooperation’
Although comparing these platforms seems superficially appealing — unlike its competitors, Telegram is not based in France, and Durov is an ally of Musk — there are key differences.
For one thing, Durov is a French citizen, making him more likely to be a target in France.
But at the same time, although Musk is a staunch advocate of freedom of expression, he generally complies with government takedown orders on X (the social platform formerly known as Twitter).
However, Telegram refused on principle.
“It’s true that cooperation on Telegram is very limited, if any at all,” said digital rights lawyer Alexandre Lazaregue.
“They don’t respond to letters, they don’t respond to summons, they don’t even have legal representation in court… whereas Facebook, Twitter, etc. still have well-known lawyers in Paris.”
Penfrat said comparisons with services like Signal or WhatsApp are also misleading, since they are encrypted by default, unlike Telegram.
He added, “So Signal and WhatsApp can say: ‘We’re cooperating, we just don’t have the information.'”
“But Telegram says: ‘We could give you all that information because it’s in plain text on our servers, but we won’t do that, sorry.’”
‘red flags’
The special status of Durov and Telegram suggests that other tech leaders have nothing to immediately worry about.
But Penfrat said he worried that the move against Telegram could be used as a precedent to crackdown on other encrypted services.
Law enforcement agencies around the world have long argued that they need access to encrypted messages to prevent criminal activity.
But services like WhatsApp and Signal have opposed this, saying the only way to do this would be to outlaw encryption.
“These allegations raise a lot of suspicions, they seem random and not very credible,” Penfrat said, adding that it’s like blaming the knife attacker.
Lawyer Martin said it was “extremely dangerous” to hold Telegram accountable for the actions of its users, comparing it to prosecuting Europcar for renting a vehicle to a drug smuggler.
Lazaregue concluded that the charges against Durov push the legal definition of “complicity” to the extreme.
“To be convicted of complicity you must know that a crime is taking place and you intend to participate in it,” he said.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
