While European regulators polish their halos and crank out legislation faster than Brussels can subsidize cheese, Pavel Durov is out here playing the role of a digital heretic.
In a French interview, the Telegram founder is sounding alarms over what he sees as a not-so-slow crawl toward speech control disguised as safety. The latest darling of the bureaucratic elite? The Digital Services Act is a piece of legislation that reads like it was written by a committee of risk-averse interns with a fetish for vague language and zero accountability.
Durov isn’t whispering his concerns at think tank luncheons or lobbying dinners. He’s calling it what it is: an institutional greenlight for censorship. “Once you legitimize censorship, it’s difficult to go back,” he says, which probably makes him the least popular dinner guest in Brussels since anyone asked about eurozone debt.
What makes this more than another libertarian tech rant is that Durov isn’t hypothesizing. He’s living it. Right now, he’s effectively stuck in France, being slow-roasted by criminal accusations that, according to him, are so flimsy they wouldn’t hold up in a Bluesky comment section.
“Nothing has ever been proven that shows that I am, even for a second, guilty of anything,” he insists.
One story in particular peels back the clean, professional veneer of Europe’s “rules-based” order.
Durov describes a charming little tête-à-tête with the head of France’s foreign intelligence service, the DGSE.
Over croissants and state-sponsored pressure, he was asked to delete Telegram channels tied to Romanian political activists.
He refused. Not with a polite “I’ll look into it” or some carefully lawyered dodge, but with what may be the most defiant line uttered by a CEO since Steve Jobs told IBM to get lost: “I told them I prefer to die than betray my users.”
Nothing screams “democracy in action” quite like a spy agency demanding censorship in a private meeting. At least they skipped the pretense.
Beneath the PR gloss of the Digital Services Act lies the basic truth of modern governance: power is being centralized and speech, sanitized.
Hellbound and Down 