Esther Mucientes
Updated Saturday, March 23, 2024-14:02
It seemed like a coincidence, but last night in the middle of the News, Cuatro, Telecinco and Antena 3 broke the news: The judge of the National Court (AN) Santiago Pedraz had given an order to provisionally block the Telegram application in Spain.
Because? Who had reported the application? Where would the judge's decision go? The first thing you need to know is that this is a measure that the
judge of the National Court
has taken in response to a demand from the Society of Services for Audiovisual Producers (EGEDA),
Mediaset España, Atresmedia and Movistar Plus+
. The three audiovisual groups and the society of audiovisual producers had denounced Telegram months ago for uploading their content without permission.
The head of the Central Court of Instruction Number 5 made the decision to suspend Telegram after
not receiving a response from the
instant and encrypted messaging application, launched in 2013, which, according to the judge and the plaintiffs, has refused to provide Pedraz with the information. that had been requested. Thus, the judge gave an order late this Friday to telecommunications operators to temporarily block the Telegram connection in Spain.
Pedraz has made use of article 141 of the Intellectual Protection Law, which, effectively, includes among its measures the suspension of the application service. Instant messaging applications, as has happened on this occasion with Telegram, are usually used to send links to third-party content, clips, movies or series episodes.
The usual thing is that they hide behind the fact that the responsibility is not theirs but their users'. However, this time Judge Pedraz requested, following the complaint from Mediaset, Atresmedia, Movistar Plus+ and EGEDA, certain information from Telegram, which was probably data to identify the administrators of the channels that share those links and content. Since there was no response from Telegram with the magistrate's request, he has opted for blocking.
A decision very similar to what happened in Brazil
with the same application when a judge requested the data of account administrators who shared neo-Nazi content.
Although the application still works, according to DownDetector, the service that records the failures of different applications, since midnight this Friday there have been more and more problems connecting to Telegram, sending messages or receiving them. According to this service, the problems most reported by its users are connection to the server (71% of failures), sending messages (23%) and logging in (5%).
In Spain Telegram has 8.5 million users
The forecast is that as the hours go by and the providers execute Judge Pedraz's order, users will not be able to access Telegram. According to computer experts consulted by EL MUNDO, Telegram could continue to be used for up to a couple more days, although everything depends on the immediacy with which the providers
comply with the suspension imposed by the National Court.
And how many users does the application have in Spain? Telegram currently has about
800 million active users
globally, according to official company information. In Spain, according to a recent survey by the National Commission of Markets and Competition (CNMC), there are 8.5 million users who use it.
Pavel Durov
, brain and CEO of Telegram, is not known for being very collaborative with governments or authorities. In fact, he has always refused to collaborate with them, even boasting that "so far we have delivered 0% of our users' data to the governments that have requested it."
It is also not the first time that Telegram has been involved in a legal conflict over copyright. In April 2020, LaLiga asked the European Union to ban 85 IPTV applications for copyright violation. In this way, he managed to close the
TDTChannels channel on Telegram
, which was dedicated to collecting links to television channel broadcasts.
The Telegram development team is currently based in Dubai after having to leave Russia due to local policies on IT regulation. Following this they tried out a few locations as a base, including Berlin, London and Singapore.
It is as if they closed the Internet because there are websites that illegally host content protected by copyright.
Facua
In 2019, Telegram blocked several channels that distributed pirated books, newspapers and magazines after collaborating with organizations in the sector. A year later, the platform was flagged by the European Union for sharing unauthorized content for download or streaming, such as music, books, news publications, movies and television shows.
Could it be a permanent block? This is a temporary measure so, according to Telecinco sources, it will be Judge Pedraz who decides to lift the suspension when he manages to gather all the data he needs for the investigation.
The consumer defense organization Facua, for its part, has considered the precautionary blocking of Telegram "disproportionate."
Facua has warned of the "enormous" damages that the judicial decision will cause
for the millions of Telegram users and for the companies, organizations and public and private institutions that legally disseminate content through their channels on this platform.
"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.