This essay originally published in the Sunday, Sept. 8, 2024 edition of the Fortune Archives newsletter.
Telegram CEO Pavel Durov is so wary of government monitoring that he rarely speaks on the phone despite having three different cell phones, the numbers of which he changes regularly. It’s “like personal hygiene,” he told Fortune writer Vivienne Walt in February 2016, “like changing your toothbrush.”
All that digital scrubbing couldn’t keep the French government at bay. Durov now faces criminal charges in France over allegations that he was complicit in a raft of criminal activity that took place on the messaging app he runs. On Telegram channels that operate like stores, users sell and buy everything from stolen gift cards to $850 sniper rifles to Colombian cocaine with a nonchalance similar to customers on Amazon, a recent Fortune examination of the platform found. “Better than street stuff around me!” one user wrote as a review of their latest drug purchase. “Recommended.”
At the core of the charges from the French authorities is the allegation that Durov knew these activities were happening on his platform and, at times, actively obstructed investigations that tried to stop them.
Durov presents himself as a free speech advocate, and his platform has attracted many driven by that tenet, from activists to cryptocurrency enthusiasts. His career in tech started in his native Russia, where he founded a Facebook-like social media site called VKontakte (known as VK) while still a college student—drawing inevitable comparisons to Mark Zuckerberg. Eventually he ran afoul of the Russian government, which asked him to ban the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny from the platform and later to hand over information about Ukrainian demonstrators. Durov declined to do so, and was forced to sell his company. He eventually fled Russia.
“It was painful,” Durov told Walt. “But now looking back, I do not feel sorry at all.”
That was arguably the defining experience in Durov’s professional life. And perhaps it explains why Durov has greeted France’s requests to monitor criminal activity—including trafficking in drugs, weapons, and child sexual abuse material—with the defiance he showed to Vladimir Putin’s autocratic crackdowns. For Durov it’s all the same: big, bad government.
