Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram, recently tweeted a long post that complains about “What was once the promise of the free exchange of information is being turned into the ultimate tool of control.” He’s referring to the internet as a whole but may not realize the hypocrisy of his statements. A number of countries are starting to implement laws enforcing privacy violating technologies such as digital IDs (UK), online age checks (Australia), and mass scanning of private messages (EU). This, of course, is going to be bad for the privacy of the people, but it will also be bad for the business plan of Pavel’s Telegram electronic messaging platform.
What was once the promise of the free exchange of information is being turned into the ultimate tool of control.
The hypocrisy here is that Pavel Durov is literally one of the billionaires trying to turn his own proprietary electronic messaging platform into the ultimate tool of control. The problem is that governments are trying to take that power away from him.
If Pavel really cared about the free exchange of information and the communications freedom of everyone on the internet, then Telegram wouldn’t exist. A benevolent billionaire who actually cares about freedom of speech, privacy, and security would instead be contributing to and improving upon the open standard communications protocols that comprise the free Internet built for us by our fathers.
If you really want internet freedom, use the open standards
The true purveyors of internet freedom are building free and open protocols at the Internet Engineering Task Force and the World Wide Web Consortium. If Telegram really wanted to support that, they would have used open standard messaging protocols like SMTP or XMPP. Those protocols are designed to be used by anyone for free and with no limitations. Not only that, but they’re also designed to federate with other servers which means the SMTP server that I made myself (How to make your own) can communicate with all of the other SMTP servers out there including the ones used for Gmail, Outlook.com, Office 365, etc. A Telegram style user interface can easily be applied to any of these standard protocols without having to enslave users into a single centralized server or client application.
Pavel doesn’t want to do that though because it would mean giving up his control over the users’ communication and thus also giving up control over the ability to abuse & profit from that user base in the future. Telegram is clearly designed for the enshittification business plan (See: Stop being naive when it comes to things like WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, etc.) and it would be foolish to think that it will end up any differently from all of the others that follow the same path.
Some good examples of software projects that do contribute to and follow the spirit of internet freedom are:
Those 3 electronic messaging systems are designed for complete internet freedom for the users. All three allow for self-hosting and unrestricted communication with no dependencies on a centralized dictator-style authority like Telegram, Signal, iMessage, WhatsApp, and even Google’s RCS do.
Those projects do also face threats from digital IDs (UK), online age checks (Australia), and mass scanning of private messages (EU) legislation, but they were built in a way that centralized governments would have little to no control over them.
If everything our forefathers left us (tradition, privacy, sovereignty, the free market, and free speech) is important to you, you’re going to want to invest in the people who are actually supporting those ideals.
Also see:
- ‘Running out of time’: Telegram CEO Pavel Durov reveals why he won’t celebrate his 41st birthday – Lifestyle News | The Financial Express
- Time Is Running Out to Save internet Freedom, Warns Pavel Durov
- ‘We’re Running Out Of Time’: Telegram’s Pavel Durov Warns Of ‘Dystopian’ Future For Internet
Photo source: Le Media