You are conveniently forgetting Durov never was the owner of Vk. Nor does his person constitute the entire "board of directors" or whatever management they had.
Telegram is banned in Russia and this new ICQ is being launched by a russian company with strong ties to the russian government, so it could be their attempt at replacing somewhat private telegram with something they can openly monitor
They already tried that with TamTam (https://tamtam.chat/) which is also owned by Mail.ru Group. I don't know anyone who uses it though and ICQ had a huge userbase in early 2000's in Russia, so maybe that's the reason?
None of us used official client. Only reason it was popular is because protocol was reverse engineered and there were clients for everyone. This is just capitalizing on ICQ name that many of russians feel nostalgic about.
I still remember my 7 digit invisible vanity number.
Just to make it clear, telegram also tied to the russian government, and they developed telegram based on the message protocol from website vk.com which also owned by mail group.
Its just propaganda move to ban Telegram to make it look independent
Mail.ru Group is controlled by Alisher Usmanov, an oligarch from the 90s and an old friend of Putin. Few years back Mail.ru group with the help of russian secret services staged a hostile takeover of VK, biggest social network in russia, essentially forcing the founder to leave the country. Since then VK data has been freely available to any russian enforcement agency, or even anyone pretending to be one. In russia there isn't even a pretense of privacy/independence from them, everyone knows FSB&Friends have unrestricted access to their stuff
It's owned by Alisher Usmanov (Putin's oligarch friend), all their other products (VK, Odnoklassniki) send all the data straight to the russian secret services, of course there isn't and won't ever be any encryption
Some more context: DST was renamed to Mail.Ru Group, and is now owned by one of the russian oligarchs (Alisher Usmanov). They also control all the largest russian social networks (some like VK through hostile takeovers) and is widely reported to pipe all the data directly into russian secret services
No mention of any sort of chat encryption either. As with all the Mail.Ru Group's other services (VK, Odnoklassniki) it is widely understood that the russian secret services have essentially unrestricted access to everything happening on them, so be advised
People don't seem to understand what level of access FSB has there. Like literal spying boxes with APIs pulling linked phone numbers and identities to associate with messages all directly controlled by FSB.
Even rms agrees that games do not need to be open source. It's when the program has control over your actual life when freedoms, privacy and security start to matter.
"hostile takeover n. An acquisition of a firm despite resistance by the target firm's management and board of directors"
it's an appropriate label considering the founder was openly against it and had to leave the country