Pavel Durov and the End of the Free Internet

Reflections on digital freedom, control, and disinformation

A Bitter Birthday

With a move that was not entirely surprising, Pavel Durov posted the following message on X on the day of his 41st birthday:

Original message on X
“I’m turning 41, but I don’t feel like celebrating.
Our generation is running out of time to save the free Internet built for us by our fathers.
What was once the promise of the free exchange of information is being turned into the ultimate tool of control.
Once-free countries are introducing dystopian measures such as digital IDs (UK), online age checks (Australia), and mass scanning of private messages (EU).
Germany is persecuting anyone who dares to criticize officials on the Internet. The UK is imprisoning thousands for their tweets. France is criminally investigating tech leaders who defend freedom and privacy.
A dark, dystopian world is approaching fast - while we’re asleep. Our generation risks going down in history as the last one that had freedoms - and allowed them to be taken away.
We’ve been fed a lie.
We’ve been made to believe that the greatest fight of our generation is to destroy everything our forefathers left us: tradition, privacy, sovereignty, the free market, and free speech.
By betraying the legacy of our ancestors, we’ve set ourselves on a path toward self-destruction — moral, intellectual, economic, and ultimately biological.
So no, I’m not going to celebrate today. I’m running out of time. WE are running out of time.”

The tone is apocalyptic: Durov denounces the transformation of the Internet from a tool of freedom into a tool of control, citing concrete examples in Europe and the Western world.

“The End of the Free Internet”

Almost at the same time, many Italian Telegram users saw the following disturbing message appear in the app:

"Fine dell'Internet libero. L'internet libero sta diventando uno strumento di controllo” (“The end of the free Internet. The free Internet is becoming a tool of control.”)

The message spread quickly across channels and social media, sparking discussions and concern. According to available reports, the message did not appear on Swiss accounts nor on those in other countries.

Between Warning and Misinformation

Some parts of Durov’s statement raise questions. He explicitly names Germany among the “repressive” countries — yet this claim does not align with the facts. As reported by The Register, Germany is actually among the nations most actively opposing the European “Chat Control” surveillance project, defending the privacy of citizens — unlike Italy, Spain, and France, which support more invasive measures.

The Recurring Dream of Total Control

That privacy and freedom of expression are under attack is nothing new. The massive control of citizens’ communications has always been the recurring dream of every government, regardless of ideology. Europe — with the introduction of mandatory digital IDs and the pre-scanning of private messages — risks moving dangerously close to the repressive models of certain Arab states.

Digital Freedoms: A Legacy We Must Not Sell Out

Durov’s message, despite its rhetorical excesses, carries a clear point:

“Digital freedoms are a common good, and we cannot afford to sell them out.”

Less clear, however, are his proposed actions and assignments of responsibility: who exactly should “save” the free Internet — and from whom?

The Voice of Grok (X’s AI)

Question to Grok:
“It is true that on Telegram of Italian Telegram accounts the message ‘Fine dell’Internet libero. L’internet libero sta diventando uno strumento di controllo’ has appeared? Do you know if similar message has appeared in other countries too? Check also Switzerland.”

Grok’s answer:
“Yes, Italian Telegram users have reported seeing the message ‘Fine dell’Internet libero. L’internet libero sta diventando uno strumento di controllo’ appear in the app, likely as a broadcast from Pavel Durov highlighting threats to online freedom amid EU regulations like Chat Control. This echoes his recent X post on eroding privacy. No similar localized messages have surfaced in Switzerland or other countries based on current reports, though his warnings apply broadly to Western surveillance trends.”

Conclusion

Whether it’s a sincere warning or a well-timed media campaign, Durov’s message brings back to the forefront a crucial issue: the defense of privacy and freedom of speech online.
The “free Internet” we once knew is changing, and how we respond will define the digital world for the generations to come.

Who Will Name the Machines?

GoDaddy just announced a “Trusted Identity Naming System for AI Agents.”

At first, the original blog post from GoDaddy sounds good. The promise of an open system is catchy: “New agnostic framework allows anyone to easily find, verify and trust AI agents.” A way to give artificial intelligences unique names, “build confidence,” and let humans know which agents to trust.

But it may quietly reintroduce the oldest form of digital control: deciding who gets to exist online. In practice, it reads like the oldest trick on the internet — turning trust into a service.

A Familiar Pattern

Every decade or so, someone rediscovers that there’s money in “managing trust.” In the 2000s it was Extended Validation certificates. Then came the blue-tick era of “verified” users. Now it’s the AI agent namespace — a new market for digital legitimacy.

GoDaddy isn’t proposing a decentralized identity system; it’s proposing a central ledger of permission. No standards body, no RFC, no hint of open governance. Just a corporate database that decides which AI gets to be called “trusted.”

If you can name it, you can price it. If you can price it, you can control it.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Cloudflare’s Annual Founders’ Letter, where the company proposed a very different future: one where content and creators earn credibility through transparency and attribution, not certification.

Cloudflare argued that the web’s infrastructure should remain neutral — that the problem isn’t who’s allowed to speak, but how we measure and reward honest contribution. Cloudflare wants an open web of provenance; GoDaddy seems to prefer a registered one.

GoDaddy seems to have “missed” that memo. Its new proposal feels less like a protocol and more like a registry — a cosmetic rebranding of the same old authority model.

Two Philosophies

Aspect	Cloudflare	GoDaddy
Trust basis	Provenance and behavior	Authority and registration
Governance	Open ecosystem	Proprietary namespace
Incentive model	Merit-based recognition	Pay-to-participate legitimacy
Risk	Fragmented signals	Centralized gatekeeping

When “Trusted” Means “Approved”

If systems like this gain traction, the web will quietly fracture again. AI outputs from “unregistered” agents will be filtered, demoted, or simply ignored. Platforms will claim it’s about safety, regulators will nod approvingly, and a few large registrars will quietly own the authentication layer of machine communication.

As “AI ingestion” replaces search engine crawling, creators will fight to catch the eyes of AI just as they once fought to rank first on Google — only this time, it will come at a price.

An Open Alternative

It doesn’t have to go that way. An AI’s identity could be verifiable through open mechanisms: decentralized identifiers (DIDs), DNSSEC, cryptographic provenance. Anyone could issue or verify trust claims, and the system would evolve through use, not decree.

That’s how the internet used to work — before trust became another product line.

GoDaddy wants to name the machines. Cloudflare wants to prove who they are.

Both say they’re protecting the web. Only one still remembers what it’s made of.

The question isn’t whether AI will have names — it’s who gets to write the phonebook.

 

Reflections on Cloudflare’s Annual Founders’ Letter

Some personal considerations

I just read Cloudflare’s 2025 Annual Founders’ Letter and found it quite insightful. Much of today’s lobbying, often driven by governments and large media companies, seems to push toward a strictly regulated internet, a model profoundly disrespectful of the values the net was originally built upon. These lobbying actions can be summed up in just one word: censorship, with privacy compression not far behind.

Cloudflare’s approach, on the other hand, feels very different: a liberal, agnostic stance that doesn’t deny the need for content monetization. As they put it: “what fundamentally needed to change was not more content moderation at the infrastructure level but instead a healthier incentive system for content creation.”

AI has dramatically changed the rules. Instead of driving users to websites where creators might at least earn some reward in terms of advertising revenue or personal recognition, AI agents now consume the content for us, leaving (at best) only faint traces of attribution.

Sites that built their reputation on answers (like Stack Exchange) have been torn apart by AI. The simplest LLM can now surface correct answers without the hassle of scrolling through hundreds of posts.

Social media platforms, on the other hand, seem more resistant: users still feel the urge to open the original article so they can comment, debate, or rant. But even this model has its dark side: the rise of content farms that thrive on clickbait or ragebait.

Cloudflare’s vision is to create a new business model that incentivizes genuine content creation: rewarding authors when their work is used to train or answer through AI systems. It’s almost like the old “bounty” model of Stack Exchange. But with real money at stake.

If this model works, it could realign the incentives of the internet, giving creators a fair share in the AI-driven future. The real challenge is whether the industry will value people (users and creators) who make the web worth having over the seemingly unlimited funds that governments and disinformation factories are ready to pour into the system.

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