A Spanish judge has paused a court order that would have temporarily closed down the popular messaging app Telegram in the country.
Judge Santiago Pedraz of the National Court made the original ruling on Friday, following accusations from media companies that Telegram had violated intellectual property laws by hosting copyrighted material without their permission. Similar complaints from media companies led Canada to institute the ‘Online News Act’, which made Meta block news access on their platforms for Canadian users last year.
In his ruling, the judge reasoned that the move was necessary as Telegram had not responded to previous requests from the court made in July 2023. Telegram is an end-to-end encrypted messaging platform founded by Russian brothers and free-speech advocates Nikolai and Pavel Durov in 2013. It is registered in both the British Virgin Islands and Dubai.
The proposed closure had sparked outrage among Telegram users across Spain. The app has approximately eight million users in the country.
However, on Monday—just hours before the order was expected to reach the internet companies responsible for shutting down Telegram—the same judge decided to suspend the order until he had received an additional police report detailing the impact of the order on the public.
This is not Telegram’s first run-in with the law. In 2019, for example, an Italian judge ordered the platform to remove groups that promoted terrorism. It was also fined in Russia for lack of collaboration with the police in relation to data of users. The emerging pattern is one of clampdowns on a free speech-oriented communications platform.
The Spanish consumer protection organization FACUA-Consumers in Action considers the order “absolutely disproportionate.”
“It is as if they closed the Internet because there are websites that illegally host content protected by copyright, as if they cut off the entire television signal because there are pirate channels,” the general secretary of FACUA, Rubén Sánchez, said in a statement.
The situation adds another element to the question of the role and responsibility of social media platforms in society and who gets to regulate them.
Telegram has taken a clear stance of distancing itself from governments and their control. The app has 900 million users worldwide and its owners told Financial Times two weeks ago that they are considering listing it on the stock market, as it is inching closer to becoming profitable through advertising.
“The main reason why we started to monetize is because we wanted to remain independent,” Pavel Durov said. “Generally speaking, we see value in [an Initial Public Offering, IPO] as a means to democratize access to Telegram’s value.”
