Imagine the following: a manager in a supermarket explaining how to setup a proxy to a customer so that she (a woman in her 60s) could use their bot again.
Or a woman with a kid who is asking what the are going to do: "It's okay, we'll ask dad and he's going to do proxy-something".
Cyberpunk is now.
Russians do make up a huge list of telegrams overall userbase. But most importantly, whatsapp and viber are end to end encrypted. Whatsapp uses signal. Viber uses a signal inspired encryption format. The common ground between both is that every single message is encrypted using a different secret key that is deleted after the message is received and decrypted on the device. Whatsapp and Viber have no way to give chat details even if they wanted to. Provided that they follow the protocol, and all accounts seem to point to the fact they do, then there is no backdoor or secret key they can give to any government.
Telegram in contrast uses a set of master keys to encrypt the conversations using RSA and aes256 as they travel through the servers. The keys are split across multiple servers residing in multiple jurisdictions so that legally, a government would have to seek permission to obtain each part of the key from a separate state.
Basically, this means that at the end of the day, if telegram ever forgoes its integrity (based off its public statements), every message will suddenly become decryptable.
That last point is what seems to really make telegram worth targeting.
Not even close. Whatsapp and Viber are much more popular. Telegram was barely 3rd before the ban. [1]
Viber moved their data to Russia, they won't get a ban.
Not sure about Whatsapp.
[1]: https://leonardo.osnova.io/bf345b20-423b-c508-cbc2-15963a7af...
Good catch!
Telegram's independence is what separates them from other services, what allowed them to deny the demand for crypto keys, and why they were targeted.
None of the other messengers you mentioned are designed to work like this (not 100% sure about Viber), the ability of operators to read most of the conversations on the platform is very much unique to Telegram.
It's really not a coincidence that the Russian government is choosing to ban the worst "encrypted messenger" on the market.
That Telegram has handed their keys to the Russian government? Difficult, but unnecessary.
That Telegram was deliberately designed in a manner which enables its owners to easily hand over the keys to the government? Easy to prove, Signal and Whatsapp do not share the same surveillance features.
Who pays for it now that it is free?
I for one refuse to think that Facebook bought it for a number of billion USD and keep operating and improving it for no good reason.
We also know, based on what they had to tell EU and based on their new EULA - that they tried to introduce by default - that they wanted to harvest metadata from it.
Attacking Telegram while simultaneously praising WhatsApp seems really strange to me.
As for Signal, that's another story. They have their own issues but I personally believe it is better than both Telegram and WhatsApp.
Look at them both from a purely technical perspective.
WhatsApp has made an effort to ensure that they're limited to only monetizing the metadata of the chats, Telegram by design does not share this limitation.
Even if you don't trust Whatsapp, you know that they'd have to push a backdoored app to everyone in order to intercept your chats. Telegram is backdoored by default.