[Longhanks]

Except Telegram does not do business in Germany. Even if Germany gets Telegram kicked off the German App Store, they have no way to block Telegram's web servers, which do not need to comply with Germany's jurisdiction.

If they don't go down the route of implementing a state-level firewall such as China is doing, they're fighting a losing battle. And frankly, if Telegram were inaccessible from Germany, the same people would simply use the next messaging app. There's nothing groundbreaking within Telegram that cannot be replicated.

IMHO, this is the government embarrassing themselves with the fact that they've lost the goodwill of a huge chunk of the population and trying to blame Telegram for it - as if the mindset and communication of those unsatisfied people would simply change/disappear if they were no longer able to access Telegram. Which furthermore shows that today's governments still do not understand the internet.

[mschuster91]

> Even if Germany gets Telegram kicked off the German App Store, they have no way to block Telegram's web servers, which do not need to comply with Germany's jurisdiction.

For what it's worth, the NRW Landesmedienanstalt is busy establishing a DNS-level censorship infrastructure against Pornhub, Youporn, MyDirtyHobby and others [1]. It won't take long until providers will be forced to also add Telegram's infrastructure to that list.

[1]: https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/landesmedienanstalt-kann...