Telegram’s Durov: We’re ‘running out of time to save the free internet’

TradingView, Inc. ^ | October 10, 2025

[MinorityRepublican]

Messaging app Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov warns that a “dark, dystopian world” is approaching, as governments worldwide are rolling back privacy protections.

“I’m turning 41, but I don’t feel like celebrating. Our generation is running out of time to save the free internet built for us by our fathers,” said Durov in an X post on Thursday.

“Once-free countries are introducing dystopian measures,” said Durov, referencing the European Union’s Chat Control proposal, digital IDs in the UK and new rules requiring online age checks to access social media in Australia.

“What was once the promise of the free exchange of information is being turned into the ultimate tool of control.”

“A dark, dystopian world is approaching fast — while we’re asleep. Our generation risks going down in history as the last one that had freedoms — and allowed them to be taken away,” Pavel added.

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TOPICS: Computers/Internet; Conspiracy; Government
KEYWORDS:

[Red6]

He’s right.

The Internet is dead.

I remember the early 90s, it was beautiful. It was slow and crude compared to today, but open and free.

Today, may it be the search engines, ISPs, government regulations forcing everyone to comply with their decency, law enforcement, mis/dis information, or intelligence requirements, the complete loss of privacy, commercial business that has structured everything to be a sales platform, or a few highly partisan monopolies that control broad aspects of communications and attempt to socially engineer things...

It’s an intellectually sterile sales platform run by algorithms where a few government bureaucrats and oligarchs decide what I get to see and then watch me seeing it, counting how many seconds I’m on that page and forcing me to click three advertising buttons to read a highly biased and amateur written news article, that’s all it’s become.

[Red6]

Everyone sees the power of information and wants to control it.

Instead of our government safeguarding the Internet, both from foreign and internal threats, being a neutral arbitrator defending free speech and the right to expression, protecting privacy, the government made itself the conductor and master of all (in the background).

They gave themselves the power to censor and invade every aspect of people privacy. They allowed a few tech giants to establish monopolies, in fact they chose the winners and losers early on as with Google.

Do you know anything run (controlled) by the government that works well?

The Internet is no different.

[dayglored]

Your two posts are, sadly, both quite true and on the mark.

I'll add something. The loss of trust -- knowledge and belief in true facts.

We no longer have any reason or justification for believing anything we find on the internet. It is so overloaded with junk that whatever true facts exist are buried below a mountain of misrepresentation and fabrication.

It's over. The beautiful network of sites to spread knowledge, to entertain, to express, to do business, to communicate with each other..... gone.

I'm lucky. At 73 I got to see it from before start to finish. Like the music of the 60's and 70's, it will never be that good again; the internet peaked and exploded and is destroyed for any real, useful purpose.

Control and surveillance are all that's left. Sic Transit.

[dayglored]

> Control and surveillance are all that's left.

Actually that's not quite true. There's Free Republic.

Thank God and Jim Robinson for that.

[Sicon]

Sadly, the Internet, and social media in particular, gave vast reach to despicable people who would otherwise be ignored and shunned by those around them. This has allowed them to spew and wallow in their antisocial bile. It has also made narcissists out of many, and destroyed actual socializing among people.

And most ironically, the access to more information and knowledge than our ancestors could ever have imagined, has led to humanity as a whole becoming incomprehensibly stupid and ignorant.

[wally_bert]

I miss the internet as it was back in the 90s and early 00s.