Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of the massively popular Telegram messaging platform, said the actions of French authorities were “surprising for several reasons.”
Durov was arrested when he landed at Paris–Le Bourget Airport on Aug. 25, and was subsequently indicted for the use of Telegram for illegal activities, including drug trafficking, organized fraud, and the distribution of child pornography. French officials said Durov’s company had not done enough to combat criminal activity on Telegram, and that Telegram had not been responsive to its inquiries.
In a public post on his Telegram channel, Durov said he and his company were not hard to reach.
“I was told I may be personally responsible for other people’s illegal use of Telegram, because the French authorities didn’t receive responses from Telegram,” he wrote, saying that reaching his company was as simple as a Google search for ‘Telegram EU address for law enforcement.’”
“Telegram has an official representative in the EU that accepts and replies to EU requests,” he explained. He added that ”The French authorities had numerous ways to reach me to request assistance,” including through the French consulate in Dubai, which he said he visited frequently.
He pushed back on assertions that Telegram is awash in criminals.
“The claims in some media that Telegram is some sort of anarchic paradise are absolutely untrue,” Durov wrote. “We take down millions of harmful posts and channels every day.”
He admitted, however, that the scale of the challenge is immense.
“Telegram’s abrupt increase in user count to 950 million caused growing pains that made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform,” he said. “That’s why I made it my personal goal to ensure we significantly improve things in this regard.”
According to Durov, Telegram doesn’t always find agreement with a country’s regulatory body when it comes to enforcement, and in those cases, it is willing to leave.
“We’ve done it many times. When Russia demanded we hand over ‘encryption keys’ to enable surveillance, we refused—and Telegram got banned in Russia,” he said. “When Iran demanded we block channels of peaceful protesters, we refused—and Telegram got banned in Iran.”
“We are prepared to leave markets that aren’t compatible with our principles, because we are not doing this for money,” he explained.
Durov criticized the very basis of the French government’s action, noting that when a country is typically dissatisfied with an internet service, the standard response is to take legal action against the service, not hold its CEO criminally accountable for third-party actions.
“Using laws from the pre-smartphone era to charge a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages is a misguided approach—building technology is hard enough as it is.
“No innovator will ever build new tools if they know they can be personally held responsible for potential abuse of those tools,” he added.
Durov was released on judicial supervision during the investigation, and is required to stay in France in the interim.