Spanish High Court banned Telegram
reuters.com
reuters.com
This is a temporary suspension while investigating "after media companies complained it was allowing users to upload their content without permission".
Pre-emptively blocking the entire app "while claims are investigated" seems pretty extreme. I thought that sort of thing was only done if 1) the judge thought the petitioners would almost certainly win, and 2) there would be irreparable harm done otherwise. Hard to see how #2 could be the case for copyright violations.
https://bandaancha.eu/articulos/justicia-ordena-operadoras-b...
It's in Spanish, but the relevant part translated:
The investigating judge, Santiago Pedraz, would have requested information from the company that manages Telegram, without having received a response, which is why he has chosen to order the telecommunications operators to block access to the servers that maintain the service, according to Europa Press1. . El País adds2 that Telegram would have refused to provide the requested information, probably related to the identity of the group participants.
The company that is in charge of Telegram messaging has been domiciled in the United Arab Emirates since 2017, although its parent company, Telegram Group Inc, is located in the United Kingdom.
At the moment Telegram remains operational in Spain, but the order is expected to come into effect in the next few hours, which will force large operators to block access to the IP addresses of the servers.
The groups I'm subscribed to are creating parallel groups in Whatsapp in case the block starts working.
Going to Meta-Facebook-owned Whatsapp is not a real alternative if you're in any way concerned about privacy or autonomy. Hosting an XMPP server is dead easy, apt install prosody and a few configuration steps and you're done. It hardly takes any resources and is nearly maintenance-free (for me 'totally maintenance-free', I have never had to fiddle with it since installing it years ago even though it has been updated as part of the normal update cycle).
Anyway, I don't believe this is going to last, unless Telegram itself decides to leave Spain. They've ignored a court request for information, not even a takedown request and they're now learning that they can't do that.
People is resorting to the app's built-in proxies, but if Telegram doesn't answer, I'm afraid that hole will be fixed too.