The problem with Telegram

On this episode of The Vergecast, we try and make sense of what happened here — and what might happen next. We talk about what makes Telegram different from WhatsApp or Facebook, the ways Durov set up and operated the company that may have made this confrontation inevitable, and whether this will have a ripple effect on the rest of the social internet. Or even the rest of the internet as a whole.

After that, we run down some of the week in regulatory and litigation news, which is more exciting than it sounds! Yelp sued Google after years of complaints, TikTok is headed to court over the blackout challenge, and California’s AI safety bill is headed to the governor’s desk. As Nilay likes to say, there are a lot of really important PDFs floating around right now. We have some thoughts on the PDFs.

Also, programming note: we’re off on Tuesday, and the third episode in our productivity miniseries will be next Sunday, not this Sunday. So we’ll see you next Friday!

If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started, beginning with Telegram:

And in legal and regulatory news:

And in the lightning round: