A Spanish judge ordered the temporary suspension of the Telegram messaging service in the country on Friday March 22 because it did not receive the data requested as part of an investigation into an intellectual property violation case.
In his order, Judge Santiago Pedraz, member of the National Audience, a court with national jurisdiction, gave a three-hour deadline to telecommunications and Internet access operators operating in Spain to carry out “the temporary suspension of resources associated with Telegram”, once they have been informed of its decision. The blockage did not appear to be effective Monday morning, according to testimonies from Spanish users on Telegram.
Mr. Pedraz ordered this precautionary measure in the absence of a response from the authorities of the Virgin Islands, where Telegram's parent company is registered, to a letter rogatory sent in July 2023 – Telegram, officially based in Dubai, where its CEO and CEO live. founder, Pavel Durov, being managed by a holding company of companies partly located in the British Virgin Islands.
In his request, the judge asked the authorities to require Telegram to provide “certain technical data that would allow the identification of the owners” of accounts used to broadcast videos from several Spanish television channels, but did not receive a response . “The lack of cooperation from the authorities of the Virgin Islands, who are only asked to communicate with those responsible for Telegram, means that precautionary measures (…) must be adopted,” argues the judge.
This judgment was criticized by consumer associations like Facua, which warned of the “enormous damage” that this suspension could cause “to the millions of users of this application”.
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Lack of collaboration with European countries
Telegram, which has some 700 million users worldwide, according to its website, has already been temporarily suspended in other countries, including Brazil last year, for failing to provide information to authorities about of neo-Nazi groups active on the platform. The company moderates very little of the content published and refuses to cooperate with legal requests except, according to it, in cases of terrorism and child pornography.
In 2022, Germany had also threatened to have the app removed from Google and Apple's app stores in the country. An agreement, the content of which was not made public, was finally reached between the German government and the application.
Russia also decreed a complete blockage of the application in 2018, without much effect – the application implemented technical countermeasures making it difficult to block. Russia finally gave up on it in 2020.
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