Recently, it was TikTok that faced Italian justice and now it is Telegram's turn to face the Spanish one. Just yesterday, the judge of the National Court, Santiago Pedraz, gave the order to temporarily block Telegram in Spain. The order would have to do with a related lawsuit linked to “uploading content without permission” and has been promoted by Mediaset España, the Entity for the Management of Rights of Audiovisual Producers (EGEDA), A3 Media and Movistar Plus. but there is a way to bypass the block.
The suspension of the messaging service must come from the operators that provide service in our country, something that could take a while, since for now the app continues to work correctly. Pedraz's measure is due to the fact that he had not received certain information that he had requested from Telegram itself. But it could be a matter of hours until the blockade takes place.
Obviously, it is still not known when we will stop having this app and if the blockage will last for a long time. But not everyone agrees with this measure. The consumer association FACUA, for example, warns of the enormous damage that the judicial decision will cause for the millions of users of this messaging application and for the companies, organizations and public and private institutions that legally disseminate content through their channels on this platform.
“Is as if they closed the internet because there are websites that illegally host content protected by copyright, as if they cut off the entire television signal because there are channels that engage in piracy,” the general secretary of FACUA, Rubén Sánchez, criticized in a statement.
Telegram is one of the most popular instant messaging applications in Spain, in fact, 54% of users use it daily, according to Statista data. Those who want to continue using this app will have an option.
Like WhatsApp, Telegram also offers the option to use proxy, a kind of intermediary between the client and the app's servers. A proxy prevents the direct connection and thereby bypasses blocking. Thanks to this we will be able to continue sending and receiving. Those who “monitor” the connection will only know that we have connected to a proxy, just as Telegram has done when it sends us another user's information. The operation is very similar to that of a VPN, a strategy to connect to websites that are prohibited in certain countries. The difference is that this last option encrypts our data, which means it is more secure or at least somewhat more respectful of privacy.
If we are willing to pay this “price”, we open the Telegram app, We go to Settings > Data and storage and there we select the Proxy option and Proxy Settings. We activate it and it will ask us to add a proxy.
The best currently, at least the most recommended in terms of security, are Oxylabs, BrightData, NetNut and WebShare.