Telegram is a big source of news within Russia for Osint, banning access would be detrimental to journalism
The founder and CTO is Durov, whose previous project, VKontakte (Facebook clone) has been effectively confiscated by Russian government.
Telegram is a Russian project. People are hoping that because it's made by a "good" Russian who isn't in Russia anymore, and holds a grudge against Russian government, Telegram won't have Russian backdoors.
I'd say, that is rather optimistic.
Critical one probably has.
>What does that mean for other countries?
That if they are involved in an armed conflict with the US, they would be better off not having US software where they don't want the US to have presence.
Which brings us to where we started: the reason for the ban is that Russia has invaded Ukraine and is waging war there, and the US isn't on Russia's side.
By the countries the US invaded, during the invasion - you bet.
>How about Israel?
I'm guessing Iran isn't a big user of Israeli software.
Conversely, the US and Israel are security partners.
How much mental gymnastics does one have to do to ignore the fact that the entire thing is about Russia waging a war in which the US is on the other side?
"Israel controls certain aspects of ..." would be somewhat more in the direction of a fair statement. But it's still not accurate. It's definitely quite fair to talk about something called the "Israel lobby", which by definition is made up of American citizens, and not even necessarily Jewish, which obviously does exert a great degree of control over, to be clear -- certain aspects of policy within the U.S.
But the Israeli government per se does not.
Though we may need to qualify that:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/24/israel...
How unusual.
Haaretz and the New York Times recently revealed that Chikli’s ministry had tapped a public relations firm to secretly pressure American lawmakers. The firm used hundreds of fake accounts posting pro-Israel or anti-Muslim content on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook and Instagram.
Posting content on social media is totally an example of checks notes[2]
>"Israel controls US foreign policy lock stock and barrel, and increasingly its domestic policy as well. If there ever was a threat to national security, this is it."
I am now absolutely convinced that Israel is an evil regime, very different from any other government on planet Earth.