Paul - Planetary Messengers
Planetary Messengers
PV Schmidt
India’s most used chat software is Telegram. The messenger is legally based in the British Virgin Islands, operated from Dubai, and owned by Pavel Durov, a quadruple citizen of Russia, Saint Kitts and Nevis, the United Arab Emirates, and France.
In August 2024, Durov was arrested at an airport in France and held for four days in custody, with the accusation of facilitation and participation in criminal activities through the lack of moderation within Telegram. Out on a €5 million bail, he shortly afterwards harmonized Telegram’s data sharing with authorities worldwide, and cleared with human moderators and ‘AI’ a lot of ‘problematic content’ and banned affiliated users. (Agence France-Presse 2024)
A lot of social contact, today, is preceded, facilitated or followed by chat, voice messages and calls over messengers. Operated on the internet, messengers appear as a technology without borders. In theory, we can seamlessly reach everyone with an internet connection through a messenger. A pledge of a sheer infinite reach is already constrained through obvious inequality in accessibility of technological infrastructure, and capped at many points beyond. The barriers originate from state and supranational legislation, over to app store rulings, or to the service's own moderation. The messengers unveil the delicate state of the open internet, as they’re central to contemporary digital life.
With this digital reality and the multilayered-platforms they’re constructed upon, novel jurisdictional configurations emerged. (Bratton 2015) The concept of the ‘planetary’ helps to bring the physical infrastructure, the technology, together with the political as one sphere to think about messengers; technology as inseparable from politics. (Hui 2024)
The messengers are influenced by major legislation such as China’s Great Firewall. A juridical and technological arrangement enclosing the internet inside the country through the blockage of manifold traffic, and the overseeing of messages. Within the European Union, internet censorship is utilized similarly for websites, used inter alia to “influence political discourse and favour businesses”. (Ververis et al. 2024, 142) A discussed chat control proposal attempts to oblige messengers to make all communications disclosable within Europe.
Some messengers are end-to-end encrypted by default (Whatsapp, Signal, Viber and iMessage), without access to the terminal devices there is no way to inspect the chats. All the others are not encrypted at all (WeChat), not encrypted by default (Telegram, KakaoTalk, Viber, and Facebook and Instagram messaging)—offering it through additional configuration, usually with the compromise of fewer features.
A planetary account of messengers needs to consider the geographies of developers and operators as well as users within their respective jurisdiction and local realities, including (geo)political dependencies and disparities as well as local and international inequalities. The planetary-discourse often considers technology as a to-be-managed challenge for grand transnational politics. But as there’s no universal face-off with technology, confronting it needs to always include the potentially suspicious—minorities and unreasonably prosecuted. The Snowden revelations taught us, that mass-surveillance and democracy are hardly reconcilable. (Lyon 2015) With the messenger, personal sovereignty only materialises through strictly private communication by default. (Anderson 2022, 13–14)
---
Agence France-Presse. ‘Telegram’s Pavel Durov Announces New Crackdown on Illegal Content after Arrest’. The Guardian, 23 September 2024, sec. Technology. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/sep/23/telegram-illegal-content-pavel-durov-arrest.
Anderson, Ross. ‘Chat Control or Child Protection?’ Universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh, Foundation for Information Policy Research: arXiv, 2022. https://doi.org/10.48550/ARXIV.2210.08958.
Bratton, Benjamin H. The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. Software Studies. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2015.
Hui, Yuk. Machine and Sovereignty: For a Planetary Thinking. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2024.
Lyon, David. Surveillance After Snowden. Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA: Wiley, 2015.
Ververis, Vasilis, Lucas Lasota, Tatiana Ermakova, and Benjamin Fabian. ‘Website Blocking in the European Union: Network Interference from the Perspective of Open Internet’. Policy & Internet 16, no. 1 (March 2024): 121–48. https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.367.
Comments
here is the comment
