Saturday night, Pavel Durov was arrested by French authorities at the Paris Le-Bourget airport north of Paris.
He was arrested in connection to an investigation of organized crime, drug trafficking, fraud, and several other illegal activities.
So, is Durov an illegal arms dealer?
Does he run a crime syndicate? A mafia head? Is he an illicit drug trafficker?
No. None of the above…
He’s a high-tech executive.
Most of us aren’t familiar with Durov, but we are familiar with his company and his product.
In 2013, Durov founded Telegram, a messaging application designed to be neutral and to protect freedom of speech and the right to assemble.
Over the last decade, Telegram grew into something much larger than what Durov probably expected. Not only does it now have about 900 million monthly active users, it has also become one of the world’s most popular social media platforms.
By comparison, Meta’s WhatsApp messaging platform has about 2 billion monthly active users.
It’s no surprise that Durov – a Russian citizen who was granted French citizenship in 2021 – has been likened to Russia’s equivalent to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg…
The problem is that neither Durov nor Zuckerberg for that matter has committed the crimes for which Durov was arrested.
Instead, bad actors have used Telegram’s social media platform to commit these crimes.
It’s worth noting that Durov has not been formally charged for the crimes for which he was arrested. Despite that, he is being held in custody and interrogated by France’s National Anti-Fraud Office.
Telegram removes millions of pieces of content each day from its platform that violates laws and its terms of service.
It’s no easy task considering Telegram is used to send billions of messages a day around the world.
This is true of other major messaging platforms as well, like Facebook Messenger (Meta), WhatsApp (Meta), WeChat, Line, Alphabet, Facebook, Snapchat, Signal, X, and others.
To be clear: Durov wasn’t arrested because he committed crimes… but because criminals used his platform, Telegram, to communicate and facilitate their crimes.
This is an incredible example of government overreach… and most certainly an attack on the human right to freedom of speech.
And it begs the obvious question: If Durov can be arrested on those grounds, why not arrest all of the CEOs of the platforms named above?
To further demonstrate how ridiculous Durov’s arrest was, we should consider other common means of communication.
For messages to be transmitted over any of the above-mentioned technology platforms, they have to be sent through internet routing equipment.
The main vendors of these routers are predominantly Cisco (CSCO), Juniper Networks (JNPR), Nokia (NOK) through its acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent in 2015, and Huawei.
Should the CEOs of all these companies be arrested because their technology platforms have been used by criminals to facilitate crimes?
Or how about the mobile networks? Criminals use mobile phones and cellular networks to conduct their “business.” Should the CEOs of AT&T (T), Verizon (VZ), T-Mobile (TMUS), Vodafone, Orange, SFR, Free, and Bouygues all be arrested, as well, because they didn’t block the communications of criminals using their wireless networks for phone calls?
The hypocrisy is unbelievable.
It reminds me of the very tired trope that Bitcoin should be “shut down” because it’s used by criminals for illegal transactions.
Yet, what’s the most widely used currency for illegal transactions in the world? You guessed it… the U.S. dollar.
And the most ironic part? Any Bitcoin transaction is immutable – written to the Bitcoin blockchain – and traceable. U.S. dollar transactions paid in cash are not.
We might not think that this is a big deal for Telegram, but it is. The digital asset behind Telegram is TON, and it dropped as much as 25% on the news of Durov’s arrest… wiping out billions in TON’s market cap.
1 Week Chart of TON – Telegram’s Cryptocurrency
Imagine the impact of similar arrests of the CEOs of some of the other companies I mentioned like Meta, Cisco, Juniper Networks, Alphabet, AT&T, and more. Imagine if they all lost 25% of their market cap on similar news…
Durov runs a communication platform. That doesn’t mean he and his team are responsible for crimes committed by others simply because their data communications traveled over their technology platform.
But incredibly, constitutional rights were violated by private companies in collaboration with the U.S. government, and not a single arrest has been made…
In a complete coincidence in terms of timing, below is a letter that Mark Zuckerberg wrote to the Committee on the Judiciary of the U.S House of Representatives…
(Click here and here to expand)
For those who haven’t been following the congressional hearings of the last couple of years, the letter might come as a shock.
In the letter above, Zuckerberg highlights the following (please note: this is not meant to be political, this is simply what Zuckerberg’s letter reveals):
Of course, anyone who has been following the congressional hearings and the facts/truth revealed from the Twitter files since 2022, as my team and I have been doing, will know that this is just the tip of the iceberg.
What Zuckerberg described in his letter is no different than the pressure that Microsoft (LinkedIn), Alphabet (Google), TikTok, Snapchat (SNAP), Twitter, and others have experienced in the last four years.
Zuckerberg and his team’s willingness to follow orders may have kept the company out of trouble with the U.S. government, but this is not an isolated incident. It was widespread and continues to this day, with the sole exception being X (Twitter).
Similar things are happening at the behest of European and other governments around the world.
What’s critical for us to understand is that these Orwellian and totalitarian actions come at the expense of our freedoms, human rights, and liberties. And sadly, they don’t curtail or impact those engaged in criminal activities.
It feels odd to suggest this, but perhaps time is better spent capturing the actual criminals and curtailing their activities…
And in the short term, how about setting Durov free?
The Bleeding Edge is the only free newsletter that delivers daily insights and information from the high-tech world as well as topics and trends relevant to investments.
The Bleeding Edge is the only free newsletter that delivers daily insights and information from the high-tech world as well as topics and trends relevant to investments.
