OK, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. They want to offer a neutral platform and seem fine with offering it for free at least until Pavel’s money runs out. But I am skeptical about people who just offer things for the good of mankind without any return. Maybe altruism isn’t dead after all!
Of course people will use their service to do nefarious things like exchanging child porn or coordinating terror attacks, but in reality they could do those things using any messaging service, and no one is going to sue or prosecute the Postal Service or FedEx for delivering the same things.
One more comment - while they say they will block (for example) “ISIS-related” bots and channels they would have no way to know what the content of a Secret Chat is, because it uses end-to-end encryption. Not that it’s unique to Telegram, but there’s an example where terrorists would benefit from this service. They say they will only give up data “if the issue is grave and universal enough to pass the scrutiny of several legal systems around the world”...which makes it pretty fussy. Clearly they wouldn’t do so at the request of say, the US government.