French police have arrested the founder of Telegram. What happens next could change the course of major tech companies

When Pavel Durov arrived in France on his private jet last Saturday, he was greeted by police and immediately arrested. As the founder of the direct messaging platform Telegram, he was accused of facilitating the crimes committed there.

The following day, a French judge extended Durov's original detention period, allowing police to hold him for up to 96 hours.

Telegram has denied the allegations against Durov. In a statement, the company said:

It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner is responsible for the misuse of that platform.

The case could have far-reaching international implications, not only for Telegram but also for other global technology giants.

Who is Pavel Durov?

Pavel Durov was born in Russia in 1984 and also holds French citizenship, which may explain why he felt free to travel despite his app's role in the Russian-Ukrainian war and its widespread use by extremist groups and criminals in general.

Durov launched a social media site called VKontakte in 2006, which remains very popular in Russia, but a dispute with the site's new owners led to him leaving the company in 2014.

Durov had recently founded Telegram, a platform that offers both the ability to communicate and share information and the protection of encryption that makes it harder than ever for people to detect and fight crime. But that same protection also allows people to resist authoritarian governments that try to suppress dissent or protest.

Durov also has ties to famous tech giants Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and enjoys widespread support in the vocally libertarian tech community. But his platform is not without legal challenges – even in his birth country.

A strange goal

Pavel Durov is, in some respects, a strange target for the French authorities.

Meta's messenger app WhatsApp is also encrypted and has three times as many users, while X's provocations of hate speech and other problematic content are openly public and spread on an ever-increasing scale.

There is also no indication that Durov himself was involved in the creation of illegal content. Instead, he is accused of indirectly enabling illegal content by running the app in the first place.

However, Durov's unique background may provide a clue as to why he was framed.

Unlike other major tech companies, it does not have US citizenship. It comes from a country with a troubled internet history – and a diplomatic reputation that has been weakened worldwide due to the war against Ukraine.

His app is big enough to have a global presence, but at the same time it is not big enough to have the unlimited legal resources of big players like Meta.

Together, these factors make it an easier target to test the enforcement of growing regulatory frameworks.

A question of moderation

Durov's arrest is another act in the often confusing and contradictory negotiations over how much responsibility platforms bear for the content on their sites.

These platforms, which include direct messaging platforms such as Telegram and WhatsApp, but also more comprehensive services such as those offered by Meta's Facebook and Musk's X, are active worldwide.

They have to contend with a wide variety of legal environments.

This means that any restriction imposed on a platform ultimately impacts its services everywhere in the world – making regulation difficult and often impossible.

On the one hand, there are efforts to either hold the platforms responsible for illegal content or to release detailed information about the users who publish this content.

In Russia, Telegram itself was under pressure to reveal the names of demonstrators who organized themselves through its app to protest against the war against Ukraine.

Conversely, advocates of freedom of expression are fighting against the blocking of platforms by users. Political commentators, meanwhile, complain about the “censorship” of their political views.

These contradictions complicate the design of regulations, and the global nature of platforms makes their enforcement a formidable challenge. This challenge tends to benefit platforms, as they can exercise a relatively strong sense of platform sovereignty in deciding how they operate and develop.

However, these complications can make it difficult to see how platforms can specifically influence public opinion and even publish their own content.

To give one example, both Google and Facebook used their central position in the information economy to promote politically oriented content and thus resist the development and implementation of the Australian News Media Bargaining Code.

The structure of the platforms also has a direct impact on what content can appear and what is recommended – and hate speech can be an opportunity for clicks and screen time.

Now pressure is growing to hold platforms accountable for moderating their users and content. In Europe, new regulations such as the Media Freedom Act aim to prevent platforms from arbitrarily deleting or blocking news producers and their content, while the Digital Services Act requires these platforms to provide mechanisms to remove illegal material.

Australia has its own online safety law to prevent platform-related harm, but the recent case involving X shows that the law's capacity may be quite limited.

Future impacts

Durov is currently only in custody and it remains to be seen what will happen to him in the next few days, if anything happens at all.

But if he is charged and prosecuted, it could lay the groundwork for France to take broader action not just against tech platforms but also their owners. It could also encourage countries around the world – in the West and elsewhere – to launch their own investigations.

This, in turn, could lead technology platforms to think much more seriously about the criminal content they host.