What might be essential right to human communication might suddenly become "illegal" according to the government.
So there should never ever be, under no circumstances, even the code and infra to be there to provide backdoor/censorships, otherwise it _will_ be abused by limiting people's communication in the moment they literally need the most.
There’s a lot of false dichotomy in the ongoing discussions here which assumes there’s a binary “control to the gov” or “freedom for all” choice. It’s a spectrum where at the most basic level, a robust process to handle reports of illegal activity should be accepted.
There are only very few illegal things that can happen within the telegram app like fraud, or minor abuse. Those must be reported by end users and individual actions can be taken against them.
What the government is asking is a massive backdoor for surveillance in the name of preventing crime, but they decide what they can monitor. It is a pandora box and if you open it there is no going back. Even if the current government is asking it with purest intentions and manage it well, the same can not be said for any next elected governments.
How is a channel "against the law?"
Do you mean access to the channel is creating opportunities for lawlessness that simply wouldn't exist otherwise? I'm not sure the French justice system has demonstrated that it has exhausted all options other than to handcuff a CEO of one particular platform.
If they do observe it, and the platform owners are responsive to taking down illegal content and/or providing information on the participants, then likely law enforcement is satisfied with that.
Telegram does not do that, and does not shut down the illegal behavior. The problem isn't that illegal stuff happens on Telegram, the problem is that Telegram won't help law enforcement when that illegal behavior is found.
They are not; however, required to prevent certain people on a prescribed government list or criteria from owning or using a telephone or from dialing certain numbers.
> won't help law enforcement
So it's not because a "channel is against the law."
Article 8 – Right to respect for private and family life
1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private
and family life, his home and his correspondence.
2. There shall be no interference by a public authority
with the exercise of this right except such as is in
accordance with the law and is necessary in a
democratic society in the interests of national
security, public safety or the economic well-being
of the country, for the prevention of disorder or
crime, for the protection of health or morals, or
for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
Thus a channel where terror actions are planned /can be made/ "against the law", but it will not automatically be so, unless there is a specific french law that makes it so.(And btw, I'm unaware of anything that exists that is a 'spectrum' apart from the electromagnetic spectrum. To have the quality of being a spectrum, the subject must continuously span a 1-dimensional space. It's a way overused metaphor, in my opinion, especially for political positions which are anything but 1-dimensional.)
So you correctly identify that modelling it as a one-dimensional spectrum is a gross over-simplification. Then conclude that as it's not a one-dimensonal spectrum, it must be a binary property? Rather than accepting that reality is more complex than is easily captured in common language?
I can see how you made that interpretation but that's not what I was saying. Free Speech is an ideal (not a binary property). I doubt that that you will find any human society with a system of laws that puts absolutely no restrictions on speech. That still doesn't mean that you can talk about Free Speech as a 'spectrum'. It's an ideal that ppl strive for, to varying degrees and across different domains. (Perhaps similarly to how Truth is an ideal that ppl strive for; Truth is not a 'spectrum'.)
It also happens to be an ideal that ppl will vigorously promote in certain domains, while betraying / discarding it in others.
There is no need for the label, other than to serve this purpose. We already have long existing words for what is lumped under so-called 'hate speech', such as bigotry, or invective or slander. But they don't contrast so neatly against Free Speech as the invented (subjective) label 'Hate Speech' does, which is why it was (only recently) coined.
My point on spectrum wasn't relating to free speech but rather free speech regulation.
Open discourse is universally recognized as a generally good thing for society.
So, we can try to embrace Free Speech ideals even as we grant our government right to censor some speech and draw (a somewhat arbitrary) line of what's allowed.
We've seen Russia, for example, abuse that power even though free speech is written into their constitution, they use that power to censor political speech and what they refer to as blasphemy, so we know this power can and has been abused but it's also possible, so, perhaps, you are right.
Plus, people aren't really obliged to love one another or their institutions. Why should I pretend, for example, that I respect some dead Iron Age prophet and people who follow him like sheep?
And yet anti-religious speech is usually perceived as hate speech by the religious folks on the receiving end.
The laws are (usually) defined by the people of a country, based on their idea of morality, and are totally in their right to reject blasphemous stuff or whatever. It's their home, after all.
The only thing non-negotiable, to me, is that the Declaration of the Human Rights is universal and no law, anywhere, should go against them.
There is no single "Europe". I have seen many women sunbathing topless in Denmark - it seems to be totally acceptable there. Haven't seen that in France - but it has a very strong nudist culture dating back at least to the 60s. Some of these nudist beaches are actually famous e.g. Cape d'Agde.
If the thing they want to delete is run by an entity that has a physical presence in that country, then they -- unfortunately -- have the right to get that material deleted.
For better or worse, we are all bound by the laws of the place where we physically reside. If we want to do or allow things online that are legal where we are, but are illegal in other countries, then we shouldn't visit those countries.
It doesn't matter if anyone "endorses" repressive governments in doing their repressive things; they are legally able to do those things to people physically present within their borders. That's just the reality of the situation.
France claims Durov allowed stuff that's illegal in France. He went to France, so France has the ability to punish Durov for his alleged misdeeds. It doesn't matter if we think that's right or wrong; that's just how the world works.
1. "I think it is perfectly fair for governments to take down large channels that are clearly against the law"
Telegram obviously acts upon such requests Here in Italy I cannot access the channels of RIA and Sputnik, obviously a request was made to Telegram on behalf of EU /Italy, and Telegram complied.
2. I think that you, in your US bubble, which you THINK guarantees free speech, misunderstand yourself what Telegram is. Right now, it is the ONLY wide audience platform in the world, where Russian people can freely (as opposed to, say, HN) write what they really think. And it is true as much for the people who are "pro", as for the people who are "against Putin", (I use these nonsense labels to adapt what I write to the general american level of "understanding" Russia).
That's a very common misunderstanding (even among Americans) of what the First Amendment actually guarantees: It protects you from government censorship of speech, but does absolutely nothing to compel private individuals or corporations to carry your speech. (In fact, compelled speech has been ruled to be a violation itself.)
That absence of such legal protections can definitely be seen as having a chilling effect on free speech in practice, but as I interpret it, currently the assumption seems to be that legal intervention is not necessary due to market forces achieving the same or a similar outcome implicitly. There's also strong resistance from a value perspective against the idea, since these provisions themselves might be incompatible with the FA for reasons mentioned above.
You can definitely have some discussions around whether additional "duty to contract" rules should apply, e.g. in the same way as there's a law in Europe that makes it illegal for banks to not give somebody a bank account in certain circumstances, but nothing like this exists at the moment.
> Right now, it is the ONLY wide audience platform in the world, where Russian people can freely (as opposed to, say, HN) write what they really think
Hackernews has always been very strictly moderated to maintain a specific type and culture of discussion. By necessity, that excludes certain types of comments. In that sense, it's always been very far away from a "free speech platform".