Over the weekend, Telegram founder Pavel Durov was arrested at a Paris airport and later charged by the Tribunal Judiciaire De Paris with enabling illegal transactions, distributing child abuse material, complicity in the drug trade, and failing to cooperate with law enforcement.
This is clearly a big moment. Here is an enormously powerful social media CEO (Telegram has roughly one billion users) struggling with the very conspicuous long arm of the nation-state. Durov fits a recent pattern of governments re-asserting authority over networks that founders, and many of the rest of us, conceive of as free-speech havens (common spaces) that officials have little right to touch.
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