Telegram messenger may stop working in Russia the day after tomorrow
The Telegram messenger, developed by the creator of the social network VKontakte Pavel Durov, may stop working in Russia the day after tomorrow. On April 4, the 15-day period expires, after which the service may be blocked, since Durov refused to hand over the encryption keys to the FSB to control secret chats.
Based on the experience of other countries where authorities also blocked Telegram, the number of users of the messenger may be significantly reduced, admitted Pavel Chikov, a representative of the Agora organization, which is leading the legal battle on Durov’s side.
According to Chikov, Russian residents make up only about 10% of the total number of users in the world, so the creators of the service prefer to refuse to transfer secret data to Russian security forces.
“Foreign users, of whom 90% are, are not affected by this hype. The Telegram story is also not well represented in the world press. Therefore, there is noise only inside Russia. Durov himself says that this Russian segment is not so large in total volume, and this is what allows Telegram not to strain too much due to threats from the authorities. In this case, the interests of foreign users dominate,” Chikov said in an interview with the Durov Code channel.
“Practice shows that half of the users remain blocked, and in Iran the percentage of users who continued to communicate after blocking reached 70%. We also need to understand how much Roskomnadzor will be ready to invest efforts in blocking.
I think that the number of users will certainly fall if blocked. Maybe at first it will drop to 30 percent, but then it will rise, to about 60% throughout the year. Users will adapt and find ways to bypass the blocking. Authorities will have to block VPNs and millions of other addresses. This is a very big job that lies ahead of Roskomnadzor. In my personal opinion, Telegram will not attach much importance to this. If out of 200 million users in the world the number falls by 7 million, then the loss will be only 3,5–4%, which is completely unnoticeable,” the lawyer assures.
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