BRUSSELS — The arrest of Telegram’s chief executive Pavel Durov in Paris on Saturday is a watershed moment for Europe as it gets tough on fighting illegal online behavior.
But in Brussels, home to the bloc’s top social media enforcers, it’s eerily quiet.
The European Union’s top brass recently ramped up their fight for a safer internet with a rulebook that promised to crack down on illegal content and disinformation on social media sites and unsafe and counterfeit goods on online commerce platforms.
And yet it’s France, not the EU, that has now crossed the Rubicon to hold tech companies and their bosses accountable, when it called out Telegram for what many regulators knew it was: a place where ads for illegal drugs and child sexual abuse material remained rife. After his arrest over the weekend, Durov was indicted on six charges earlier this week and released on bail of €5 million.
Paris did not rely on the EU’s new Digital Services Act (DSA) in its crackdown and has not yet involved the lead regulators overseeing Telegram under the EU’s content-moderation regime. EU regulators in past months launched high-profile cases against X, Meta and TikTok — but not Telegram, despite its reputation for being a go-to place for illegal content.
“The arrest itself of the [Telegram] CEO has nothing to do with the DSA,” said European Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier.
The preliminary charges, published by the French prosecutor Monday evening, confirmed that the case was led by French domestic cybercrime and anti-fraud units, and most of the charges centered on Durov’s alleged complicity in criminal acts.
Telegram has said it was “absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform.”
Yet, some accusations Durov faces in France, including complicity in the possession of child sexual abuse material and the refusal to work with authorities, indicate that Telegram could face much more scrutiny under the DSA.
Off to a slow start
The EU’s enforcement of the DSA rulebook has only just begun. In some ways, it has been a slow start.
Regulators have focused their investigations on heavy-hitters like TikTok, X and Meta — companies that all have been designated “very large online platforms,” which face the strictest obligations under the DSA.
The rulebook’s cross-cutting obligations — which apply to any platform, Telegram included — kicked in on Feb. 17. That day, EU internal market chief Thierry Breton said that “effective enforcement is now key to protect our citizens from illegal content.”
The catch? In the case of Telegram, Breton and his EU-level watchdogs are not responsible for such “effective enforcement.” Telegram has consistently claimed it has fewer than 45 million users in the EU— the threshold for qualifying as a platform overseen by the European Commission itself.
Without that designation, it was left to Telegram to decide which of Europe’s national regulators would be its overseer. In early May, it was revealed that Telegram had picked a Belgian-based EU legal representative.
That means it’s up to Belgium’s authorities to enforce Telegram’s DSA obligations — such as complying with orders from authorities to remove illegal content like terrorist propaganda or child sexual abuse material.
Despite the DSA coming into full force in February, it was only at the end of May that the Belgian telecoms watchdog was legally appointed as the competent authority to oversee Telegram.
The Belgian telecoms watchdog insisted on Tuesday it was not involved in the French investigation, and said it hadn’t received any information from the French DSA enforcer, the audiovisual regulator Arcom.
“We do of course keep a close eye on the case,” spokesperson Nathalie Dumont said.
For many in Brussels, the Telegram knot brings to mind a policy headache they had tried to avoid when drawing up the bloc’s social media rules.
The Commission had planned to centralize enforcement of high-profile cases after previous digital regulatory efforts, most notably within the bloc’s flagship privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), took years to get up to speed and still cause friction among national regulators.
In response, the EU sought to avoid that tension by making itself the designated regulator for the largest internet platforms, known as Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs), at the Commission’s tech department DG CONNECT in Brussels.
Telegram’s user numbers fell just short of what was required to be placed under Brussels’ oversight; it claimed it had around 41 million users in the EU as of February this year.
“There’s what the platform says, and there’s what we do. Especially when you’re so close to the thresholds, we, of course, monitor this carefully,” Regnier, the Commission spokesperson, said.