On 10 October 2025, Telegram users received a notification pinned above all chats and channels warning of the ‘end of the free internet.’ It linked to a post by Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, published on the morning of his 41st birthday.
In the post, Durov called for ‘saving the free internet created for us by our fathers.’ In his opinion, the internet should help people freely exchange information, but instead ‘it is turning into a tool of control.’ As examples of ‘dystopian measures,’ Durov cited France, Germany, and the United Kingdom — countries once considered free.
France
In France, a law on ‘digital platform responsibility’ (Loi sur la responsabilité numérique) came into force in 2024, requiring social networks and messengers to store user identifiers and provide them upon request by authorities as part of the fight against ‘disinformation and hate speech.’ After that, a number of VPN services and anonymisers were blocked. Critics of the law call it a ‘soft version of the Chinese model,’ where security is used as a pretext for total control.
Germany
Germany has updated its NetzDG 2.0 law, tightening requirements for platforms. Companies are now required not only to remove ‘harmful content’ within 24 hours, but also to hand over user data to the federal police without a court order if a post is interpreted as a ‘threat to public order.’ In 2025, journalists and bloggers who criticised Berlin’s policies on migration and energy transition fell under this rule.
United Kingdom
In the UK, following the adoption of the Online Safety Act, the government gained the right to require messengers to provide built-in access to encrypted messages ‘in exceptional cases’. In practice, this means the effective weakening of end-to-end encryption in services such as WhatsApp and Signal. In early 2025, several companies (including Proton and Element) announced their possible withdrawal from the British market, as compliance with the law is incompatible with the principles of user privacy.
ProtonMail as a Swiss Alternative
Against this backdrop, the speech by ProtonMail representative Marc Loebekken at the War, Peace & Neutrality forum at the UN on 10 October was particularly telling. ProtonMail is a company born out of the protest spirit of CERN and the idea of digital independence. Loebekken recalled that the project was launched in Switzerland in 2014 as a response to ‘massive state surveillance taking place with the complicity of big tech.’ However, even Switzerland is now losing its neutral status. Switzerland, where digital privacy was once considered sacred, is now moving towards universal control.
‘Switzerland decided to revise its framework on surveillance and integrate a full indiscriminate data retention model, which would force all providers to collect a large amount of data about users. That goes directly against the values that Proton stands for.’
As a result, we are seeing democratic states begin to implement the same digital control practices that they previously criticised authoritarian regimes for. Laws passed under the pretexts of ‘security’ and ‘public good’ too often undermine the very foundations that distinguish democracy from digital authoritarianism. The right to privacy, freedom of choice.
Therefore, it is not the technology that needs to be reviewed, but the principles themselves.
“We should develop tools to not put everyone at risk by collecting data on everyone just for the sake of maybe marginally improving some criminal cases, which is basically the trend we see with child control and data retention.”
