On Wednesday, French prosecutors indicted the chief executive of the popular messaging service Telegram on charges of complicity in the distribution of child sex abuse images, aiding organised crime and refusing lawful orders to give information to law enforcement.

After four days of interrogation following his arrest at an airport near Paris, prosecutors charged Pavel Durov with multiple counts, ordering him to post a 5 million euro ($5.6 million) bond and forbidding him from leaving France.

The case against the 39-year-old billionaire offers a singular challenge to the power of governments over multinational technology companies operating under a set of widely divergent laws around the world. Durov’s Telegram is rare in that it operates out of a nonaligned Middle East country, the United Arab Emirates, and publicly claims to share no information with any authorities about messages or activities on the site. He holds French and UAE citizenship, having left Russia in 2014 amid what he said was a fight with the government over what he would cough up about users of the social network he’d founded, VKontakte.

While the owner of X, Elon Musk, and others have publicly decried the investigation of Durov as an attack on free speech, child safety advocates say Telegram allows more illegal activity, including images depicting abuse, than any other major network. The laws in most countries, including France and the US, don’t protect platforms from prosecution over illegal content. A lawyer for Durov, David-Olivier Kaminski, made the same declaration to journalists in Paris after charges were filed Wednesday, Le Monde reported.

French magistrates can charge suspects and place them under formal investigation. That does not mean the judicial authorities have decided whether sufficient evidence exists to take the case to trial. Investigations can take years. Law enforcement agencies in many countries have targeted the app because it has become a tool of choice for child predators, terrorist organisations, narcotics traffickers and ordinary criminals, some of whom advertise and recruit openly on the network.

Telegram has also been used to disseminate propaganda and hate speech banned in some countries, with national governments barring the app or telling it to take down offending content. In 2023, Brazil issued a temporary ban on Telegram as investigations looked into neo-Nazi groups who allegedly used the app to coordinate attacks against schools. On the other hand, Telegram has become an object of fascination for various intelligence agencies, too, which would want to know who is behind accounts that seem to work in concert with governments and other forces. It has kept what encryption it does use from public review; it’s also unknown whether spies have managed to break into it remotely.

In Russia, officials and prominent figures have lashed out at Durov’s arrest and advised citizens to delete their old messages as a precaution from becoming an easy target of France and its allies. Some officials said the arrest by the French was just a pretence to gain access to the digital keys that would permit the authorities to see all messages except those sent encrypted end-to-end. Some European intelligence officials have even suggested that Durov is cooperating with the Russian authorities, pointing to his blocking of accounts affiliated with domestic opposition movements.