New interview with Pavel Durov: about Russia, about security and global trends

The British newspaper Dazed yesterday, April 2, 2015, published an interview with Pavel Durov, the founder of Vkontakte and the CEO of Telegram.

"Megamind" leads the most interesting quotes and facts from the interview.

In 2006, when Vkontakte appeared, Russia was in a free Internet space, which was not controlled by the government.
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Much could have been done in such a situation. The government paid no attention to the Internet, and perhaps such inattention is the most underrated function of any government on our planet.

How has Russia changed since that time?

The increased political activity of the opposition in the runet has led to the government issuing laws restricting both users and providers.

Durov did not agree with the policy of the Kremlin and refused to cooperate with him. For example, he did not close the pages of the opposition. Moreover, he refused to provide the authorities with the data of people who organized rallies in Ukraine. This led to the fact that last spring Durov was fired from his own company.

Facebook has demonstrated a willingness to cooperate with the government. So, recently Alexey Navalny's page was closed. What is your view on the fate of Facebook? Can such actions lead to a significant drop in attendance?

Facebook as a service is far from perfect. He is no longer enjoying success with the younger generation. However, so far they have managed to buy all of their serious competitors. I think this will not always be the case. There are companies that are not for sale. Telegram is one of them.

What are the differences Telegram from other instant messengers?

You can do so much with Telegram: use it simultaneously on several devices, including laptops and tablets, send video of huge size, perform an instant search among all your messages, set a timer for self-destruct messages, process photos, reply to individual messages in a group chat, set additional passwords and so on. That was what WhatsApp was supposed to be, but it could not.

The main thing is that all messages in Telegram are encrypted very securely and really provide the secret of correspondence.

What do you think about the siding movement, the participants of which want to establish floating city-states, the so-called “start-up countries”? Balaji Srinivasana, one of the participants of the movement, said in October last year: “We want to show how a society could look like under the leadership of Silicon Valley.”

I fully support them. This world definitely needs more experimentation and innovation when it comes to education, taxation, migration policy, elections, and so on.