On 24 August, a Russian tech billionaire’s private jet landed at Le Bourget airport, north-east of Paris, to find that officers of the French judicial police were waiting for him. He was duly arrested and whisked away for interrogation. Four days later he was indicted on 12 charges, including alleged complicity in the distribution of child exploitation material and drug trafficking, barred from leaving France and placed under “judicial supervision”, which requires him to check in with the gendarmes twice a week until further notice.
The mogul in question, Pavel Durov, is a tech entrepreneur who collects nationalities the way others collect air miles. In fact it turns out that one of his citizenships is French, generously provided in 2021 by France’s president, Emmanuel Macron. Durov is also, it seems, a fitness fanatic with a punishing daily regime. “After eight hours of tracked sleep,” the Financial Times reports, “he starts the day ‘without exception’ with 200 push-ups, 100 sit-ups and an ice bath. He does not drink, smoke, eat sugar or meat, and saves time for meditation.” When not engaged in these demanding activities, he has also found time to father more than 100 kids as a sperm donor and to rival Elon Musk as a free-speech extremist.
Media profiles of Durov bring to mind Churchill’s celebrated description of Russia as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”. Durov left Russia because the Facebook clone he co-founded with his brother Nikolai in 2006 led to conflict with the Kremlin. He eventually moved to the United Arab Emirates, where he set up Telegram, a privately held social media platform that is almost as mysterious as its founder.
Telegram has about 950 million regular users. It’s partly a messaging system like WhatsApp, but whereas WhatsApp caps group numbers at 1,024, Telegram allows up to 200,000 and in that sense it’s also a broadcasting system like X. One-to-one communications are end-to-end encrypted only if users choose the “secret chats” option, which since many internet users never change the default settings in effect means, according to one security expert, “that the vast majority of one-on-one Telegram conversations – and literally every single group chat – are probably visible on Telegram’s servers”.
Given that, what’s puzzling is why there are so many bad actors on the platform. After all, rats generally abhor sunshine. But, as one critic puts it: “Telegram is the nearest we have to a popularised dark web. Nearly a billion mostly regular folk are rubbing shoulders with criminals, hackers, terrorists and child abusers. Despite the lack of technical security and privacy, the platform is a honeypot for those operating in the shadows.” And perhaps they stay because Durov doesn’t believe in content moderation. Indeed, he has sometimes boasted about what a lean operation he runs. Like Musk, he doesn’t believe in expensive moderation teams. And one of the motivations believed to lie behind the French prosecution of him is the way his company has refused to cooperate with law enforcement agencies that are investigating criminal activities on the platform.
Telegram’s finances are also somewhat mysterious. Documents leaked to the Financial Times detailing its 2023 operations show that it lost $173m that year. Its business model seems hazy, consisting of rudimentary advertising, subscriptions and – wait for it! – the toncoin cryptocurrency. Prior to Durov’s arrest, there had been talk of an initial public offering, which now looks like a pipe dream.
But all of this is just background noise masking the epochal significance of Durov’s arrest in a wider context. For the past three decades, the democratic world has been in a funk about two challenges posed by a world dominated by tech and its corporate masters. The first was the impunity apparently conferred on tech moguls by section 230 of the 1996 US Communications Decency Act, which liberated them from liability for what appeared on their platforms. The second concerned the discrepancy between local laws and a global technology that transcended frontiers.
Well, just about the time that Durov’s plane was touching down in Le Bourget, a judge in a US district court was handing down a landmark judgment indicating that the free ride provided to corporations by section 230 may be coming to an end. And a French legal authority signalled to a tech overlord that while he might think he rules the world, France controls its own airspace. Which is why Musk may need to think twice about overflying Europe in future. Vive la France!
What I’m reading
Hold that thought
A Thinker Thinks is a lovely, quirky essay by Joseph Epstein in the London Review of Books on the difficult art of thinking.
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Authority figure
Read The Perils of State Power, Yascha Mounk’s transcript of his marvellous interview with the late, great anthropologist James C Scott.
Black books
Roland Allen’s enjoyable essay Moleskine Mania: How a Notebook Conquered the Digital Era in the Walrus looks at the strange persistence of the black notebook.
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