Durov case: why didn’t French judges investigate the leadership of their internet providers, which host child pornography images?

How come Durov was arrested on charges of aiding, through Telegram, pedophiles, while the operators of France’s leading internet service provider, Free.fr, are at large and free?

As Liberation reports, in a report on “The accessibility of child sexual abuse images on the Internet,” published on June 9, 2021, the Canadian Centre for Child Protection (CCPE) says it has analyzed 5.4 million child sexual abuse images observed between 2018 and 2020 among more than 760 electronic service providers. It finds that “almost half of the images detected (48%) are linked to a file-hosting service operated by Free, a French telecommunications operator listed on the stock exchange.”.

In an era where the Internet is brimming with grassroots efforts to stop child porn, the CCPE’s legitimacy in this regard is undeniable. This nonprofit, which was established in 1985, has received recognition from the Canadian government. It is best known for creating the cybertip.ca website in 2002, which is thought to be the main hub for reporting incidents of child sexual exploitation on the Internet.

With its own child pornography content recognition system, called Project Arachnid, the CCPE says it has sent free “removal requests for over 18,000 archive files collectively containing nearly 1.1 million verified photos and videos categorized as child sexual abuse images or harmful or violent images. Project Arachnid found multiple access points to these archive files throughout the Web, bringing the total number of images detected to over 2.7 million.”

The report devotes an entire chapter to the case of the French telecommunications company, in which the CCPE questions the file-hosting site dl.free.fr, which “seems to be popular with Internet users who want to anonymously distribute large volumes of images” and “is recommended in underground Web forums for the distribution of child sexual abuse images.”.

The Canadian child protection association harshly criticizes Free, saying that the company “has not taken much care of this service in recent years”, since the hosting site’s home page had not changed its appearance since 2008 and used “the obsolete unsecured hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP)” and “the ‘Report illegal content’ link presented on the home page” led to a 404 error message. The CCPE also notes in its report that it began communicating with Free employees from 2018 onwards to send them lists of links to files hosted on their servers containing images of child sexual abuse and continued these requests with the Project Arachnid software “for each new detection of images of child sexual abuse and harmful or violent images on their servers.”. The association regrets that, as of May 18, 2021, nearly 3,000 archive files that had been the subject of deletion requests during the three-year period studied were still publicly accessible.”.

We could therefore say that Free.fr, which is owned by Iliad.S.A. is in a similar, if not worse, situation than Telegram and Pavel Durov. Worse because objectively its hosting services host, or were hosting, specifically reported child pornography content that, instead, remained on the platform.
French judges arrested Durov, but there is no record that they acted against Free or Iliad management. Evidently the target of the judicial operation is not pedophiles or drug dealers, but something else entirely.