Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of the popular messaging platform Telegram, said the French authorities' actions were “surprising for several reasons.”
Durov was arrested on Aug. 25 while landing at Paris-Le Bourget airport, and Telegram was subsequently charged with illegal activities, including drug trafficking, organized fraud and the distribution of child pornography. The French authorities said Durov's company did not do enough to fight criminal activities on Telegram, and Telegram did not respond to the requests.
In a public post on his Telegram channel, Durov said that he and his company were not difficult to reach.
He wrote that he was told that he would be personally responsible for the illegal use of Telegram by other people because the French authorities had not received any replies from Telegram. For law enforcement.
“Telegram has an official representative in the European Union who receives and answers EU questions,” he explained. “The French authorities had many ways to contact me to ask for help,” he explained, including through the French consulate in Dubai.
He pushed back against the claim that Telegram was rife with criminals.
“Claims in some media that Telegram is some kind of anarchic paradise are untrue,” Durov wrote. “Every day we download millions of harmful posts and channels.”
However, he acknowledged that the scale of the problem is enormous.
“Telegram's number of users reaching 950 million has created pains to make it easier for criminals to abuse our platform,” he said. “That's why I've made it my personal goal to improve things dramatically in this regard.”
According to Durov, Telegram does not always reach agreement with the country's regulatory body when it comes to implementation, and in those cases, it is willing to let go.
“We've done it many times. When Russia asked us to hand over ‘encryption keys' to enable spying, we refused – Telegram is blocked by Russia. We refused when Iran asked us to shut down the channel of peaceful protesters – Telegram is blocked in Iran.
“We are prepared to leave markets that do not conform to our principles, because we do not do this for money,” he explained.
Durov criticized the basis of the French government's action, noting that when a country typically finds Internet service unsatisfactory, the standard response is to take legal action against the service, not to hold the CEO criminally liable for the actions of a third party.
“Using the rules of the pre-smartphone era to sue a CEO on a platform they manage for crimes committed by third parties is the wrong approach – building technology is just too difficult.
“No innovator builds new tools if they know they can be held personally responsible for misuse of those tools,” he added.
Durov was released under judicial supervision during the investigation, and is expected to stay in France temporarily.
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