Remember Pavel Durov, the Telegram founder we wrote about last year, now he is back with an interview with the French newspaper Le Point where he did not spare French President Emmanuel Macron any criticism: ‘Emmanuel Macron is not making the right choices. I am very disappointed. France is becoming weaker and weaker’. Durov added: ‘If you raise one or two generations with a certain mentality, it then takes decades to change it. If we continue to waste time, the risk increases that the country will have to undergo very radical changes. When we delay necessary reforms for too long, we end up seeing a collapse,’ the Telegram founder continued, warning that France is losing talent to other jurisdictions such as Dubai.
These accusations are mainly directed at the various tweets that Durov had posted on the X platform (formerly Twitter) in the past few days concerning the French secret services that allegedly asked him to censor pro-conservative content relating to the Romanian presidential elections last May.
In the interview, Durov went on to argue that laws such as the European Union’s Digital Services Act are a double-edged sword for censorship disguised as consumer protection regulations and tools to fight disinformation or promote online safety: ‘These laws are dangerous because they can be used against those who created them. Today they target those who are labelled as conspiracy theorists. Tomorrow they could target their authors”.
How, indeed, can we not forget the clash last summer between Musk and the then EU head of the internal market, Thierry Breton, after the latter had admonished him in a letter to comply with the DSA. An action that appeared to be more censorship than compliance, since in communicating it Breton had not aligned and coordinated with either President Ursula Von der Leyen or the European Commission college.
This happened very close to the famous live interview between Musk and Trump: a two-hour ‘interview’ on Musk’s platform, X. Actually, the European Commission did something: it distanced itself from Breton’s action, thus denying the content of the letter sent the previous day. An embarrassing situation for the EU executive, to say the least, which highlighted how sensitive a regulation such as the DSA is. It ended with Breton resigning some time later.
And coincidentally, again only a few days later, Durov declared that Telegram will also have a new source of revenue: a one-year deal to distribute Grok, an artificial intelligence model of Elon Musk’s xAI , in exchange for $300 million in cash and shares in the artificial intelligence company.
So, it would still seem to be yet another joke by a tech company founder against European politicians, one of many techno-revolutionaries. So far, the French one, Macron, seemed to have won. In fact, after Durov’s arrest last summer, he had been given a 96-hour detention followed by parole until the end of the investigation. The Wall Street Journal reported that on 12 May his request for special dispensation to travel to the US to negotiate with investors on the new $1.5 billion bond issue was rejected because the reason for the trip ‘was neither compelling nor justified’.
But it is recent news that Durov has obtained a relaxation of his judicial supervision. According to Le Monde, Pavel Durov will be allowed to leave France for a maximum of fourteen consecutive days from 10 July, only to travel to Dubai, where his relatives reside and where Telegram is based.
The Durov case continues to be quite disturbing. In part, because it is broadly reminiscent of the Assange case – for freedom of speech -, in part, because it was France itself that imprisoned him, the home of liberty, fraternity and equality. Yet the investigation, almost a year after it began, is still not over. Moreover, it is to all intents and purposes a geopolitical case. In this article, we had already dealt with it, outlining the relations with Russia in a very delicate context for a type of platform such as Telegram, and the charges against its CEO.
But in the Italian newspapers today we only read about his inheritance (around 15 billion euro), which will probably not be obtained by his 106 children (6 natural and 100 through sperm donation).
Telegram has around one billion monthly active users and has declared a profit of around $540 million for 2024 on a turnover of $1.4 billion. While governments try to regulate cyberspace, figures like Durov seem to remind us that the net, for better or worse, still remains frontier territory. (photo by Dima Solomin on Unsplash)
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