Spanish judge orders Telegram messaging application blocked

Madrid, Mar 23 (EFE).- A judge of the Spanish National Court has given telecommunications operators three hours to block the instant messaging application Telegram in Spain, according to the judge’s order that became known on Saturday.

Judge Santiago Pedraz’s order came in response to a lawsuit filed by communications and telecommunications companies Mediaset, Antena 3 and Movistar, who accused the application of hosting copyrighted content without authorization. Pedraz said that the measure was “necessary, appropriate and proportionate” because, in his opinion, there was no alternative to prevent the repetition of the facts in question. The judge pointed out that the authorities of the Virgin Islands, where Telegram is registered as a company, did not cooperate in asking the company to report certain technical data that would allow the identification of the owners of the accounts that violated intellectual property rights. Telegram has permanent cloud synchronization, something that WhatsApp does not have, allowing its users to share an unlimited number of photos, videos and files (doc, zip, mp3, etc.) of up to 2 GB each.

The platform also allows the creation of bots (automatic messages) and broadcast channels with up to 200,000 people per group, which many activists and politicians use to distribute their messages. Telegram has been removed from app stores or blocked by courts in several countries for allowing the sharing of illegal content and, in the case of authoritarian regimes, for encouraging protests by opponents. In May 2020, the Spanish Center for Reprographic Rights (Cedro) blocked 122 Telegram channels with more than 380,000 users, in which thousands of bootleg copies of books, newspapers and magazines were shared during the pandemic lockdown. Spanish consumer organization Facua and the Council of Computer Engineers considered Saturday´s block “disproportionate.” “It is as if they shut down the Internet because there are websites that illegally host content protected by copyright, or as if they cut the entire television signal because there are pirate channels,” said the secretary general of Facua, Ruben Sánchez, in a statement.

The shutdown of the application does not mean that the more than eight million users in Spain will have to remain without access as they could use a VPN – virtual private network – to geolocate virtually to any country other than Spain. Launched in 2013 by Russian brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov as an alternative to the WhatsApp application, Telegram quickly gained popularity for its security and user privacy, and now has 900 million users worldwide. The Telegram team had to leave Russia because of local policies on IT regulation and has tried a few locations as a base, including Berlin, London and Singapore, and is currently based in Dubai. EFE has contacted Telegram’s communications team, which has not yet responded. EFE so/ics