Friday’s decision will be repealed, the National Court of Justice announced on Monday in Madrid. Judge Santiago Pedraz revised his decision because he concluded that a blockade was “excessive and disproportionate.”
Blocking Telegram would harm “millions of users,” the court said. It is known, the statement says, that the platform is also used for criminal activities. But there are also a lot of users who have chosen Telegram because it offers advantages that other platforms do not have. Among other things, Telegram’s user privacy is particularly well protected.
Just a few hours before his decision was canceled, Pedraz had initially suspended his order on Monday and commissioned a report on Telegram from the Commissioner General for Intelligence.
The judge only ordered the temporary block on Friday after several media companies filed a lawsuit against Telegram for violating copyright protection regulations. Telegram could still be reached from Spain until Monday. Consumer advocates in Spain, where there are several million Telegram users, criticized the measure as disproportionate. However, country restrictions can be relatively easily circumvented using protected network connections (VPN).
Requests for administrative assistance went unheard
Pedraz ordered the blocking after he repeatedly unsuccessfully requested administrative assistance from the authorities in the British Virgin Islands in the Caribbean, where Telegram is registered. According to the judiciary, the authorities there did not cooperate in clarifying the identities of the owners of Telegram accounts from which copyrighted content was distributed.
The newspaper “El País” wrote that Telegram regularly refuses to provide information to the authorities. Since the service protects the identity of its users more than its larger competitor WhatsApp, it is preferred by opponents of the regime in dictatorships. There are therefore also channels on Telegram with criminal or extremist content. According to the paper, the blockade that has now been canceled was not only about protecting copyrights, but also about a conflict between the judge of a constitutional state and a private company, as well as about the balance between anonymity and impunity on the Internet.
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Source: Nachrichten
