Telegram is about to be blocked here in Brazil

Honestly to me this is less dystopian than having unaccountable business wholesale ignore the laws of a nation state, which Telegram seems to do just about anywhere. Not sure since when literally following the law qualified as authoritarianism.

many things are important and all of them have in common that they find their limits within the bounds of the law. Brazil has a different take on freedom of speech than the US. You can argue about the details of this particular case of course and whether it's politized or not, but it isn't authoritarian at all to demand that tat a tech company acts within regulations. A Russian dude running a company out of Dubai by American speech standards is a nice cosmopolitan tale but has little relevance in Brazil.

>Or will you now say they shouldn't have done what they did?

Yes I think they should not have done what they did, or slightly more nuanced, if they thought it was ethical to do what they did, they should have accepted the punishment. Assange's wholesale dump in particular was damaging not just to US national security but also civilians who assisted American forces and whose identity was exposed, but that's another discussion.

"It seems that we had an issue with emails going between our telegram.org corporate addresses and the Brazilian Supreme Court. As a result of this miscommunication, the Court ruled to ban Telegram for being unresponsive.

On behalf of our team, I apologize to the Brazilian Supreme Court for our negligence. We definitely could have done a better job.

We complied with an earlier court decision in late February and responded with a suggestion to send future takedown requests to a dedicated email address. Unfortunately, our response must have been lost, because the Court used the old general-purpose email address in further attempts to reach us. As a result, we missed its decision in early March that contained a follow-up takedown request. Luckily, we have now found and processed it, delivering another report to the Court today.

Because tens of millions of Brazilians rely on Telegram to communicate with family, friends and colleagues, I ask the Court to consider delaying its ruling for a few days at its discretion to allow us to remedy the situation by appointing a representative in Brazil and setting up a framework to react to future pressing issues like this in an expedited manner.

The last 3 weeks have been unprecedented for the world and for Telegram. Our content moderation team was flooded with requests from multiple parties. However, I am certain that once a reliable channel of communication is established, we'll be able to efficiently process takedown requests for public channels that are illegal in Brazil."

https://t.me/durov/180