The common fallacy people have regarding chat control (and should be clarified) is that it's not like internet is made of a few select providers, anyone can open an encrypted tcp connection from an ip to another, and the global traffic is too massive to be scrutinized, also the most widely available apps already comply to the single police request to access conversations from suspects.
This means that this will create further privacy for criminals such as pedophiles and mass espionage for the common man.
It's also curious to notice that at every proposal stage, politicians are always conveniently exempt from the regulation, which is hilarious coming after the Files.
Yeah but messaging apps are really only useful if there are lots of people on them to message.
So in the real world a relatively small number of providers, WhatsApp, Signal etc, are in a position where all your friends are going to be on them. And those are the ones likely to be named and told they need to implement image scanning/review.
Messaging protocols are useful even if everyone is not on the same app. In the past I was chatting with my google using friend via some third party jabber server where I had an account. It was useful and didn't require us to be "in the same app". We both were using both different apps and different server providers.
But actual protocols are so last century. You might have to think ahead for fifteen minutes because the design has to be staaaa-a-ble. It's haa-a-ard! And you can't sell out to somebody who'll change it and have an exit event.
Does governments have any say in this? If not then most MEPs of mentioned countries are too in favor of Chat Control. This is what it says when you click on one of the 4 countries.
Instead of the usual knee-jerk it would be nice to see some level-header analysis on mechanics of these things - who pays for the time of the people that decide to push this particular piece of legislation, how they manage to get into the door, who personally makes the proposal, how they gather support for it.
Robert Metsola met Ashton Kutcher (co-founder of Thorn, which develops message scanning tech) in March 2023 and posted a photo on Instagram. Kutcher lobbied MEPs hard in favour of strong detection measures.
Law enforcement at all levels traditionally has a strong lobbying presence. Their public affairs departments are well-funded and do not cease operations just because some initiatives are delayed due to temporary push back. Transparency legislation often does not apply to their efforts either.
Overcoming the complex challenges outlined above requires multifaceted policy considerations that focus on both societal resilience and enabling effective law enforcement within the EU’s robust legal framework. Key actions should include:
Establishing lawful access by design to E2EE communication channels in cooperation with service providers and regulators.
First, why does the EU leadership refuse to learn from falling behind the US economically and technologically, most starkly with AI recently, and their failures in regulating the Internet, most annoyingly the cookie law? And why aren't you, the EU citizen, more annoyed by it? I see a lot of pro-EU content on this site when they're terrible on both tech and entrepreneurship.
Second, what's up with Denmmark pushing for it here? They're usually very reasonable.
Ar they, though? The established longterm consensus is pretty reasonable in the EU, it’s not self evident that things have been going in the right direction on the whole in recent years.
The green deal stuff seems to be pretty bad. Manufacturing seems to have a hard time. The next tier economy, e.g. AI, is not seen on the horizon. Over-the-top regulations for agriculture and then opening up the market from goods where such regulations don't exist does not seem smart either.
And there're lots and lots of small things like those.
Yeah, I meant mostly the 80s and 90s (i.e. the period when the Western European countries were able to keep up with the US or ever narrow the gap). Since then they have just been coasting on top of that.
I don't want to enter into conspiracy territory, but it seems that there's a big insistence from whomever is behind pushing for this to pass at any cost. First it was Denmark, now the EU parliament president, a Maltese. What's for certain is that those that stand to benefit massively are governments and politicians themselves.
And no, it's certainly not that bullshit astroturfed story that has been going around, of Meta behind this concerted effort across the Western world because they're too lazy to validate one's age.
They would be exempt, along with military and intelligence personnel. So they can enact mass surveillance, stop any form of dissent before it has a chance to grow, while themselves remaining above the law.
Some sort of perverse inclinations of controlling other people’s lives and knowing what’s “better” for them. Delusional and narcissistic people seem to be generally significantly over represented in politics (another demographic is useful idiots, put those two together and well..)
Not sure what OP meant, but they talked about goverments and "politicians" rather than EP specifically.
I think several EU governments want chat control paving the way for domestic surveillance. Though I don't consider that conspiracy theory really. Last years, there have been big scandal cases with use of pegasus, predator and similar spy software from several EU governments for domestic surveillance (eg Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Spain). The issue is that legal surveillance, the regular phone tapping kind, is inefficient due to people using E2EE chat apps rather than regular phone calls and SMS. There is no legal basis for the more advanced spyware afaik, so these surveillance cases were illegal and kinda "off the books", even though rather widespread. A legal way to surveil the people would be welcome to those who did that and those who want to do the same.
The population doesn’t support chat control. The European Parliament rejected the chat control proposal earlier this year. Now it seems that the European Parliament president is trying to bypass that
I think Denmark is one of the most surveiled countries. And with the most compliant population. They call it trust... Denmark is not the fairytale they try to market them selves as. This is closer to their true color in my opinion. You could also try to look up the cases with former and current politicians in dk who actually have gotten caught perpetrating the very thing chat control is said to stop.
I'm to afraid of the f'ing EU to mention specific names here... But maybe some braver souls will
Denmark’s recent reasonableness is somewhat of a historical aberration if you look at their history. The migrant crisis (and the failure of governments to address it) has stirred up some ugly things there.
What do you mean the migrant crisis stirred up things? The anti immigration position in danish politics has been a winning position since the mid 00's.
As the crisis has worsened across Europe, Denmark started unbelievably intrusive AI-enabled mass surveillance of welfare recipients (almost 15% of the population), dangerous infrastructure which could be applied to the population as a whole. And I’d argue that fears over migrant-driven crime are what allowed Denmark’s politicians to push for Chat Control in the first place.
Yeah no I don't buy that, and have never heard that angle before. Surveillance in Denmark is much older than that. Since the personal ID number was rolled out in 1968 its been one long process of integrating public systems with each other to surveil and control. Surveillance of welfare recipients started getting serious in the 00's too. The migrant crisis drove polices like the confiscations of jewelry from foreigners, and public funded commercials in the middle east telling people to stay away.
Internally chat control and migration are never talked about together. Chat control has no leverage on migration in Denmark. Its not a factor that would change anything. It's all about international treaties making it impossible to send people out of the country forcefully. That's the policy the migrant crisis really ignited.
Sounds like you would know more on this, then, I had heard that there was a link between Chat Control and migration. I was also unfamiliar with Denmark’s long history of surveillance, as I’d literally never heard of this being an issue there until recently—but I do not live there. Thank you for the correction.
Edit: this in no way should be read to condone Denmark’s position here.
Dane here, I don't think there is much of a link. The government is usually pragmatic about security, and has long leaned into technology to achieve it.
What is funny is that it has been pushed by the social democrats. See also what Labour have been doing in UK.
Whatever we call centre-left today we would have placed much further to right a couple decades ago. At this point even the US Democrats are more progressive than our EU "liberal" parties.
The whole left vs right is a useless caricature. And it’s especially meaningless when comparing ideologies across country borders. Better talk in terms of policies.
While the EU is not perfect and surely needs improvement in many areas, it is still better than not having it. This is why you see a lot of pro-EU content: many people here (myself included) are of the opinion that the EU needs to be improved, not dismantled.
Yes, you are right, the only two possible choices are to either give the government an absolute mandate to spy on every citizen, or to abolish the EU altogether, no other option is possible.
>While the EU is not perfect and surely needs improvement in many areas, it is still better than not having it.
Would you still believe this if Chat Control got though? What good did the EU bring that's good enough to make up for the badness of everyone in Europe having all their private digital communications constantly scanned?
If Chat Control gets through, it means the Parliament approved it, which means the EU people voted for politicians that supported the idea. If the EU got dismantled, the same politicians would be elected (they won once why not twice) and do it again at the local level. (though, maybe not in every country)
Yes, definitely. Just as an example, my country wouldn't have a lot of consumer protection laws we now have thanks to the EU. As a concrete example, there used to be a single phone service provider acting as a monopolist and we had the highest phone bills in the EU. When this started to change, it still wasn't possible to keep the same phone number when switching providers, which is a huge thing for businesses and freelancers. The EU forced our government to change this. And I'm not even talking about all the financial help that we got from the EU. Which, admittedly, was used poorly by my politicians. But this isn't the EU's fault, it's their fault.
> What good did the EU bring that's good enough to make up for the badness of everyone in Europe having all their private digital communications constantly scanned?
Peace in Europe. You have to remember that the EU is fundamentally the world's most successful peace project, founded after the horrors of WW2 to make war in Europe not just unthinkable, but materially impossible.
Before the EU, we had centuries of constantly being at each others throats. There hasn't been armed conflict between EU members and there won't be for as long as it exists. It worked. It broke the cycle of generation after generation of horrible slaughter.
Chat Control is obviously bad. But fundamentally, the good of peace outweighs even that.
However, one should also note that Chat Control is pushed by the member states and their representatives - the EU is actually the institution that's kept it at bay so far.
> You have to remember that the EU is fundamentally the world's most successful peace project, founded after the horrors of WW2 to make war in Europe not just unthinkable, but materially impossible.
You're confusing the EU with NATO. Germany is already planning on re-arming[^1] because NATO is dead. The EU is by all means an unfinished project and if I had to bet, I would bet that it won't survive the next two decades. There's no pro-EU majority in any European country right now. Not one. It's a great idea, very poorly implement that gets (some times unfairly, some times fairly) all the blame for everything wrong with Europe right now. Migration, energy, housing, etc.
I am not. See the Schuman Declaration [0] for context on why the EU came to be.
> It proposes that Franco-German production of coal and steel as a whole be placed under a common High Authority, within the framework of an organization open to the participation of the other countries of Europe. The pooling of coal and steel production should immediately provide for the setting up of common foundations for economic development as a first step in the federation of Europe, and will change the destinies of those regions which have long been devoted to the manufacture of munitions of war, of which they have been the most constant victims.
> The solidarity in production thus established will make it plain that any war between France and Germany becomes not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible. The setting up of this powerful productive unit, open to all countries willing to take part and bound ultimately to provide all the member countries with the basic elements of industrial production on the same terms, will lay a true foundation for their economic unification.
> There's no pro-EU majority in any European country right now. Not one.
That couldn't be further from the truth.
* Pew Research, May 2026: Majorities in eight of the 10 countries (surveyed) currently have a positive opinion of the EU. [1]
* Gallup, March 2025: No country approves of their own leadership, or that of U.S., over the EU [2]
Also, the least consequential even ignoring often stated fact that cookie banners are malicious compliance. I care much less about cookie banners than about the ads, and for both of I have uBlock origin filters. So, what to be angry about exactly?
And either 80% of banners are not respecting the law, or the law managed to omit mandating making it as easy to reject as accept... Rejecting usually require you to enter into settings and sometimes click "reject" for every individual partner(!)
That was the case in the beginning, for a while. Now I rarely see even ones where I have to click Settings and Reject all, usually it's just Accept all and Accept only essential. No dark patterns just two equally visible buttons. Often also just "We use only essential cookies" and OK button because they don't have 1138 partners they want to sell your data to
"Cookie banners are malicious compliance" is starting to wear thin as an excuse. GDPR went into law in 2018, almost ten years ago and for almost as long websites have been "maliciously complying". If you don't don anything about it at some point it's not malicious anymore, it's just how the law is meant to be interpreted.
I have a different hypothesis for why the GDPR exists: it is to create a market for EU based compliance companies.
> And why aren't you, the EU citizen, more annoyed by it?
Because the USA tends to privilege corporations over people whereas in the EU it's more balanced (still pretty biased towards corps, though), and I am a people, not a corporations.
Take, for example, the 'cookie law': I much prefer being annoyed by the cookie pop-up over websites shoving a ton of unnecessary and unwanted cookies onto my computer without permission.
...speaking of which:
> and their failures in regulating the Internet
Which political entity would you say has done the best job in regulating the Internet? Where are citizens most protected from being inundated with advertising, unwanted cookies, unnecessary JavaScript, false news, scams, and all the other garbage one is normally subjected to when not putting in some amount of effort in combating that shit?
And because you are grateful for the cookie policies you don’t mind rewarding them with unlimited access all your private communication? I don’t really follow this argument..
> would you say has done the best job in regulating the Internet
So again.. how do these basic/superficial (or even if they are extremely effective and useful, that doesn’t really change anything) regulations justify mass surveillance?
> false news
For what its worth in no way has the EU been effective in doing anything about this (I’m not sure they even tried doing anything that directly addressed it?)
> And because you are grateful for the cookie policies you don’t mind rewarding them with unlimited access all your private communication?
No. Where do you even come up with this stuff?
> So again.. how do these basic/superficial (or even if they are extremely effective and useful, that doesn’t really change anything) regulations justify mass surveillance?
Answering a question with a question only works if the question used as answer is a simpler way of getting the answer to the original question.
> For what its worth in no way has the EU been effective in doing anything about [fake news]
Okay, so which country/state/union/whatever has been effective in doing anything about it? Because according to the post I responded to there is someone way better at regulating the Internet than the EU is, so I'm wondering who it is.
inundated with advertising, unwanted cookies, unnecessary JavaScript, false news, scams,
I’d rather have that instead of govt monitoring of all communications. Your govt can hurt you more than any of those things. Especially in the EU given what happened just a few decades ago.
Remember that scandal about that subcontractor for Apple which installed suicide nets after thirteen workers died and another five attempted suicide by jumping off buildings? But no, corporations good, government bad. At least when it comes to government I get to vote. Even better: I'm Belgian, I HAVE to vote, it's not just a right, it's a civic duty. What, when it comes to corporations I can 'vote with my wallet'? I'm sure Apple, whose profits exceed those of some developed countries, will surely change their ways if I boycott them over stuff like the Uyghur slave shops.
Also:
> I’d rather have that instead of govt monitoring of all communications.
False dilemma, you can have neither. But sure, EU bad because you're not allowed to deny the Holocaust or call for the extermination of Jews/Muslims/the gays/...
> What, when it comes to corporations I can 'vote with my wallet'? I'm sure Apple, whose profits exceed those of some developed countries, will surely change their ways if I boycott them over stuff like the Uyghur slave shops.
Your argument is that voting with your wallet doesn't change things even if it reduces the profits of the company by an amount proportional to the number of people who do it, but voting in an election does where not only is your vote is still diluted by millions of other people, the result is all-or-nothing and the party/candidate doing the thing you didn't like can still retain full control of the government even after losing a couple percent of the vote?
It's the same problem in both cases. What you need is enough viable alternatives that you can pick the one doing the right thing instead of being given a fake choice between two or three "alternatives" that are all doing the wrong thing. And markets with hundreds of competitors are a lot more common than elections with hundreds of candidates/parties on the ballot.
One big thing you need a government to actually do is break up consolidated markets, and the current ones are evidently ineffective at it.
European here. I like the cookie law. It's made it clear to people how much we're being tracked and I can choose to opt out. The implementation could of course be better but the real issue is the scummy web devs choosing to make it as annoying as possible instead of taking the more sensible decision to not have 150 trackers on every page.
>> I see a lot of pro-EU content on this site when they're terrible on both tech and entrepreneurship.
Life is bigger than tech or entrepreneurship. In the 00's I dreamed of moving to the US. That's changed, especially over the last decade. If I was offered a huge salary tomorrow to work in the US I would turn it down.
Website operators hate these cookies popups because they make their website more annoying and make me more likely to press the back button and click on a different website. As it should be. This incentivizes them to stop tracking me.
Why then do they make the most annoying, user-hostile dark pattern cookie banners they can come up with? No, website operators hate that they have to either stop spamming thousands of tracker scripts or put up a banner.
They found out that they can offload blame on the EU instead and so have chosen to make the web as annoying as possible.
Yeah, that's more the point; in discussions with clients I very often get asked how far we can go without any consent. Most companies want all the privacy ignoring stuff and they don't want to tell their users about it.
Realistically you won't be caught analyzing server-side logs of things the client is doing anyway, even if you don't follow GDPR rules with those logs. But they want Google Analytics, right?
The solution to that one is pretty simple, simply don't collect information you don't need, and you can avoid the banner altogether! Github manages to not have banners, it's not because of magic.
There is no obligation to put a banner of you don't sell your users' data to third parties. The law is very clear that your don't need it for period technical cookies, so it's really always and every time solely about tracking and advertisement money.
You do need it for analytics though, or any other non-essential purpose.
You could probably argue self-hosted, privacy-preserving analytics is a "legitimate business purpose" so doesn't need consent. AFAIK it's because you're sending user data to Google that you normally need consent for GA.
99% of the people just click accept and go through.
This could be solved on the client side, by requiring all devices with browsers sold in EU to have separate cookie jars per domain and by default those cookies would be deleted on window/tab close. If you wanted to stay logged in to a site, you'd click a button next to the url bar that says "keep cookies for this domain", and be done.
Cookies have literally nothing to do with GDPR or the ePrivacy directive. It is mentioned I think twice total in both documents as an example of how user data is persisted and tracked across domains, but ultimately the mechanism is irrelevant.
So you like the law, but don't like how it didn't actually solve the problem it was trying to solve?
I assume you're pretty well read up on matters of privacy, right? So you have a better awareness and understanding. But do you believe the average person does? Or would you assume that the average person has either been trained to ignore the banner, automatically consent to more invasive tracking, or is generally more confused about why the banner exists, or what it does?
The cookie consent law is the dumbest application of an attempt to improve privacy. It's made the internet worse, and is being used to train people into consenting to giving away their privacy without thinking... because: "clicking accept is what you have to do to use the page" -- every normal person casually browsing any site.
No implementation for cookie based consent can be done correctly.
Personally, I'd love to see a law that makes any/all dark patterns a crime, and empowers state prosecutors via grand jury to bring charges for them against both the company, and individual authors of the specific commits as jointly responsible. I don't want statutory laws, I want a trial jury to look at it, and decide if any technological measure, pattern, tactic, procedure, design, or measurement was used to encourage one decision over the other instead of a fair choice.
I don't want a set of rules that given enough funding any company is able to win as a negative sum game. I want a jury, not a trailing clause, to decide if the company is clearly acting in good faith or worthy of apocalyptic fines.
> So you like the law, but don't like how it didn't actually solve the problem it was trying to solve?
(Not the person you replied to)
I'm not sure where all of this is coming from, the law is actually extremely obvious and useful: you want to track people, they have to be informed, and have to consent. The law says nothing about how, and the way it was implemented was entirely up to the corporations discretion, which of course opted for the most malicious terrible way to do it, but they did it.
The purpose of the law was that people should be informed about cookies being installed and consent to that happening.
Do you feel like people are now aware that cookies are being installed, more so than before the banner? Do people understand that they are consenting to this?
That is the law at work.
Everything above and beyond that is nice to have, and I'm sure the world would be better for it, but without the EU, people probably wouldn't even know what cookies were, let alone understand (or have control over) how they are being tracked.
If that's not a net positive in a world where net-negatives happen every week, I don't know.
> I don't want a set of rules that given enough funding any company is able to win as a negative sum game. I want a jury, not a trailing clause, to decide if the company is clearly acting in good faith or worthy of apocalyptic fines.
You want the winner to be the side with more expensive lawyers who use psychological manipulation techniques against a jury?
In general juries are the finders of fact. They decide what happened, e.g. who is lying. Judges decide the law, i.e. whether the thing the jury says they did is a violation of the law.
What you're asking for is to have the jury decide what the law is. There are a lot of problems with that, but one of the big ones is that jury determinations don't have to follow precedent and, unless you want judges ultimately deciding it anyway, can't really be appealed. Which would result in zillions of spurious lawsuits against innocent people because a small percentage of them would win big at random.
> falling behind the US economically and technologically
Are you even human? Do you really believe what you say? Doesn't it come across as absurd, from everything that happened to the US since the Snowden revelations, the Patriot Act, spiraling into fascism, a first time attacking science and democracy, a second time to install oligarchs, traitors, corrupt and incompetents to run the state, with the result of tanking your real economy (on every metric that's not related to AI), burning down your soft power, burning bridges with every ally, losing the war against Iran, and causing a generational talent exodus out of the US?
Oh yeah, by no means am I blindly defending "the EU leadership", but some reality check is much needed.
At least there’s free speech and people are not arrested for mean memes (as is the case in UK and Germany).
Burning bridges with “allies” which were taking advantage of you?
This gets brought up a lot, and I’m not sure how to explain it. But inconsequential complete free speech is not the top issue for some people. People have different priorities.
Democracy only works well when the populace is properly informed and it's much easier for someone to tell a lie than for someone else to disprove that lie. Think of the Alex Jones Sandy Hook hoax conspiracy hypothesis.
A group of protesters got 50 years in jail for daring to exercise their constitutional duty against ICE illegally detaining citizens. Meanwhile the J6 thugs all got pardonned by the literal pedophile in office, and not a single Epstein victim got any justice.
Why does any country or bloc need to learn lessons about "falling behind" the US?
Why is that the yard stick?
I certainly don't spend all day dreaming of F150s, McMansions, the psychopaths leading silicon valley, 9 lane highways, US style PE, and world-class fascist politicians such as Trump
A couple of decades ago both France and Britain had higher per capita GDP than the US. Now they are significantly behind.
Similarly top European companies used to rival American companies in profitability, power and valuation. There’s not really an equivalent of FAANG/ NVIDIA in Europe, just ASML and LVMH.
It's not like we can do anything.
We don't have democracy - we can't vote on issues and we (in most countries) can't even vote on people. We just vote on 2-3 non-fringe parties and they choose people and policies. You may formally put an X next to some name but it's just a chosen party official. They need to walk party line and be in good standings with the leadership to even get on the list.
There is just nothing you can do really in that system other than pursue career in politics which is a no-go for most people for obvious reasons.
Yeah, we can: I am from Poland and precisely through this mechanism our MEPs/delegates/nominates know that supporting this would be a disaster for their political group right here back home regardless of direct voting.
The problem with the EU is that there are many levels of abstraction, and the more links in a chain the more susceptible to corruption it is.
This becomes immediately obvious when you vote for a party who fails to fulfill, or even go against their policies. Then for the EU there’s an additional level of abstraction for the commission. At this level, the voter is far removed from their initial vote and are completely powerless.
There are too many levels of indirection. At least in some countries you can vote on a person representing your town/area. This is one level of indirection less and allows people who aren't just chosen party members to win and then they have incentives to help the region.
In "standard" party democracy there is just nothing that can be done. Calling it democracy as in rule of the people is a disgrace.
The education system has failed in the EU, but in a different way than it has in the US.
I realised this when people thought mandating the USB-C connections was a good idea because "it is the best standard". I didn't think the mandated connector was a huge deal per se, but it made it clear to me that there is a flawed thought process behind EU regulations. And this is a big deal.
Many things are not really understood in the EU. The majority don't seem to understand free speech.
The EU has an article about free speech that clearly states there is no free speech, but people point to it when they claim there is.
Of all things to criticise, you pick out the one ruling that eventually lead to a consolidation of chargers? Really? I haven't ever met a single person who wasn't grateful of being able to have one cable for all their devices.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. A short-term view of the world, progress and technology.
All my devices supported USB-C before the EU regulation. But if I wanted to buy a device with a new type of connector, I should have been able to. This is how the USB-C came to be and how any new standard in hardware happens. New technologies are made and just sold, and if they are proven to be superior to others in the market, they often become standards.
The USB-C standard is not the best standard that can exist from now to the end of the universe, but if this discovery process is blocked, we will be stuck with it forever, which, of course, will also constrain the design and engineering of devices in other ways.
It's the same fundamental flawed thought process that has made the EU reliant on the US for a lot of services.
> All my devices supported USB-C before the EU regulation.
I don't have this particular problem so it doesn't exist!
It did exist for huge amounts of people. At the time, many manufacturers had proprietary plugs and would still have them if it weren't for this decision.
> The USB-C standard is not the best standard that can exist from now to the end of the universe
Which is why the law can be simply amended as soon as such a standard emerges. If the industry figures out something better than USB-C, pressure will build on the council to do so. This is nothing but a straw man.
> I don't have this particular problem, so it doesn't exist!
No, what I said is that you could find devices with USB-C in all the categories that are now regulated. This means it was pretty easy to find devices like that if you really valued USB-C. Of course, if you wanted an iPhone but you liked USB-C, you would have had a problem. A problem that is much less worse than blocking progress.
> Which is why the law can be simply amended as soon as such a standard emerges. If the industry figures out something better than USB-C, pressure will build on the council to do so. This is nothing but a straw man.
You totally ignored what I wrote, or you didn't understand it. No standard can emerge if you can't test it on the market. You can have a bureaucrat choose the next one from some proposal. It's not the same.
You might have a point. But, at the same time, AFAIK the only manufacturer that complained about USB-C (and, coincidentally, making the exact same argument as you're making) was Apple. And they definitely weren't interested in making the lightning connector an industry standard. Quite the opposite.
It doesn't really matter to me, because even if that's true for Apple (or it was at the time), it still means other companies can't test new technologies. They might as well be OK with that, but it still means that consumers won't get new standards.
The first attempt at enforcing such a standard in the EU was made with mini-USB.
It failed to become a regulation (fortunately), but I have no reason to believe USB-C is different, and no better standards would have been tried by companies if they were allowed to do so.
On the other hand, USB-C wouldn't have become a true standard if no-one forced Apple's hand. It's a compromise and, for the time being, I'm happy with this. As another commenter noted, if we feel the need for a new standard the law can be changed in the future. I concede that, depending on the future's situation, this could be difficult to do. But, without such law we wouldn't have had a standard to begin with.
> On the other hand, USB-C wouldn't have become a true standard if no-one forced Apple's hand
I don't want a state-dictated standard like this. What you're saying is that because some people want iPhones and they want them with USB-C, everyone else must forgo the possibility of having a better type of connetor until "we" (Is it the majority? I don't even think the majority uses iPhones in Europe) feel like having a new one (at which point the progress has been delayed anyway and you'll also get the initial problem again).
I find the premise quite capricious.
Same as before? A group like Intel, Microsoft and a few more create a new standard and can get the eu to adopt it. Which popular cabling standard wasn't designed by one of the big ones?
Well you are ignoring what I or the other comment replied almost entirely.
There were many competing standards and it took quite a while for the market to converge on usb-c and only then when it was already the most popular connector by far did EU determine it was the “best” standard.
Firewire, Thunderbolt 1, all kinds of different usb type ports where designed by various groups of companies it was not self evident that they will fail in the market at that point.
No industry group let alone an EU committee can know what will fail or succeed in advance its just an absurd assumption that it could ever be otherwise.
People are getting real EU fatigue from both sides of the spectrum. The attacks on privacy are the most concerning, the members of the high level group pushing for ChatControl and other surveillance state measures are still anonymous, while the Commissioner's Pfizer chats are still nowhere to be found--not that they would be subjected to the same surveillance as the little people. The needs of those bureaucrats sitting in their glass windowed buildings--with AC still running on their tallest floors where the commission staff works, while shut down on the lower ones--clearly do not match what the average person wants or expects. How much can they push it further? They're only adding fuel to the fire that will replace them with something just as bad, if not worse. It's hard not to be skeptical considering the exceptional level of lobbying steering regulations. The latest is the utterly idiotic, anti-consumer de minimis threshold changes, with an incomprehensible "per category" fee on every purchase outside the EU, lobbied for by EuroCommerce, killing entire hobbyist fields (e.g. anything to do with electronics) in the continent.
A blanket control affecting privacy would be bad. However we need controls that can prevent criminals from hiding behind anonymity and being able to organize massive activities just with a few online posts. These days it is trivial to organize and radicalize the youth into wrong paths overnight using social channels. You just need to say something that aligns with their problems, and most people get consumed by the divisive speech easily.
The effect is already seen how the ability of rioters far exceeds that of the authorities during recent incidents in UK and other places. Something need to be done for this.
1. They are criminals. Criminals are not bound by laws.
2. Trying to reduce anonymity to go after criminals, simply means giving up anonymity for all but the criminals. See point 1 ... Criminals do not care and will find ways to not get caught.
3. I find the idea of this blanked statement that protesters are criminals insane dangerous and smells of authoritarianism. Peaceful protesters are just that, peaceful. Those that do crimes during protests, are criminals who can be literally caught.
4. The issue of "ability of rioters far exceeds that of the authorities", is more that the authorities do not have their ducks in a row. Blanked mass surveillance is not the solution.
5. Where does it stop? A what point are we running Russia like Max surveillance software on our smartphones, tracking where we go, who we talk too, ... all in the name of catching maybe, some criminals.
> Something need to be done for this.
Its called a better and responsive police force.
> radicalize the youth into wrong paths overnight using social channels
Imaging, that those people who radicalize youth are, ... not using social channel to do so. Wait, ... how did most of the people who ended up going to Syria get radicalized? Most was not via social media, it was with direct contact. Do we ban social contact?
This is just the typical quick fix type of answer. Problem, must be X. No, lets not invest money into police, social councils, case workers, etc...
Thing is, we have seen police getting lazy because, hey, why do investigation work if we can just get free evidence from criminals phones. O, those criminals now encrypted / try to hide data. Ok, so we now need to make it illegal because screw society, we want easier jobs.
No, everybody needs to give up their privacy "for the greater good". You must have something to hide, if you do not let the government read what you wrote, today, yesterday, 10 years ago ...
Have you ever been to China or other countries where saying the wrong thing, can be unpleasant to life changing? Where people learn to not talk what they rally think outside their little family corner. Where corruption is rampant because nobody can protest. Remember, today its your criminal protesters, tomorrow if a government changed into one you do not like, you become the criminal protester.
The right answer is a better funded and accountable police / social structure / help systems. And accountability, to ensure proper policing.
> No, everybody needs to give up their privacy "for the greater good"
You can bargain (via voting) about how much of the stuff you need to forgo. But you can't have 100% privacy, if the nation has to function.
You don't need to give up any privacy at all, if you don't expect anything from government. But the concept of a nation is hinged upon it's citizens foregoing a bit of privacy, a bit of their income, a bit of their freedom. The nation imposes rules that you need to follow (loss of freedom), asks you to pay up taxes and makes your identity linked to the citizen services.
The nation comes into existences precisely from the things that you forego.
Respectfuly, that's an impressive load of bullshit.
Two cases in point:
- UK's Farage recently causing riots, destruction of property, arson and bringing harm to non-whites, intentionally, previously being openly supported and amplified by Musk.
- USA's lame duck president Trump causing January 6, 2021 riots ending up in destruction of property and killings of five people (including Capitol police officer)
The perpetrators causing the shit are very well known, their followers do not try to hide themselves, and no amount of mandatory ID when accessing the Internet would stop it.
Oh, and if you think being anonymous makes people nasty, you should stop by some Facebook or Nextdoor forum :)
This is just outright wrong. Europe in general has gotten less and less violent over the last decade. Despite evils like the internet, smartphones, and tiktok. I'd argue it has become more difficult to rile up people than it was 40 years ago
You are free to 'argue', but you need to read about how the modern riots are being organized on a massive scale, so that you can correct your argument.
Petition to force everyone saying "you need to read about XYZ" to provide at least 2 sources where one can actually read about XYZ.
- If you can't provide any sources, it's safe to assume you don't actually know what you're talking about.
- If you can, but choose not to, why? This simply weakens your argument.
- When you say "you need to read about XYZ", you probably WANT people to read about this, right? So why not point them at least to Wikipedia?
1. It seems that most of the evil here is concentrated among the liberal right and liberal left. Both far right AfD types and the left are against this.
2. A lot of positions, when clarified, just want to keep the (bad) status quo of CC1.0, while opposing 2.0, which was the much more totalitarian one. This also includes the crucial shadow rapporteurs.
This is still not good, but unless I've understood something very wrongly here, this isn't the same as just pushing the worst version of chat control 2.0 through.
I grew up when everyone was saying "don't post your face, name or address on the internet" - and that's what I've done. There are a total of maybe 3-6 pictures of me on the internet and my real name isn't attached to most of my brainfarts online.
It's not that I hide it like a secret agent, I just don't shove my face and name next to every opinion I have.
But the younger generations... They grew up with Snapchat which means Snap Streaks, which again means posting your face with every message. Next was Facebook, real names everywhere. Then came "personal branding", again face and name plastered everywhere.
And now governments want to lock in the real name + face + identity combo for everyone with laws. Fuck that.
> There are a total of maybe 3-6 pictures of me on the internet
Incorrect, you are probably in the background of random photos on the internet, and by virtue of not having any profiles and social media sites can tag you and form a shadow profile around you.
I still remember conversations here on HN, around the time Facebook was launched. It was considered insanity that you would give up your privacy to a firm.
I remember how that what seemed absurdly risky, meant absolutely nothing to the average person, and the astronomic value Facebook began to accumulate.
I wonder if it wasn't social media that set up the death spiral of the internet. The walled gardens on content and then the ad revenue created incentives to increase engagement, while capturing the value which would have gone to the open internet.
In that light, it seems AI firms are going to complete what Social Media started. Sequestering the remaining value of information and content, and then earning rents on it.
We can't even enforce basic protections of human rights in the United States, privacy does not matter when there are rampant black operations being conducted which violates human dignity in every sense of the term.
The illusion of digital privacy was always, propaganda. There's a pretty good chance your organism is literally compromised.
>privacy does not matter when there are rampant black operations being conducted which violates human dignity in every sense of the term.
You have this completely backwards. The threat and existence of such operations is one of the fundamental reasons privacy does matter so much. Privacy is to be protected heavily not just for the now but for what could happen in the future, and it's self-reinforcing. A more privacy preserving society is a harder one to oppress.
I think I understand what you are saying, let me reply with an example in which I think 'privacy' is harmful.
Lets say military intelligence has multiple NATO hospitals compromised, and have assets in these hospitals which are being used for various black operations (including non-medical neurosurgery on literal children). In this scenario, maybe total societal surveillance, including radical transparency, would have been a nice thing to have in regards to bolstering national security?
Instead, we got HIPAA, and other medical privacy laws/standards, which are aiding literal mass atrocity to continue to proliferate.
OK, setting aside the possibility this is some sort of joke/sarcasm I can't quite get, and the absolute wtf of this "scenario" which doesn't exist and all the ways it cannot exist with nothing to with privacy, and taking it sorta seriously, your argument completely falls down here amongst other places:
>Lets say military intelligence has multiple NATO hospitals compromised, and have assets in these hospitals which are being used for various black operations (including non-medical neurosurgery on literal children). In this scenario, maybe total societal surveillance, including radical transparency, would have been a nice thing to have in regards to bolstering national security?
Why the heck would you think that the first job of a hostile military intelligence wouldn't be TO COMPROMISE THE TOTAL SOCIETAL SURVEILLANCE NETWORK!?!? There is a sort of really fundamental common failure to this kind of conspiracy thinking, wherein simultaneously your opponent is this incredibly powerful and skilled entity, one that in this case can compromise lots of secured aspects of society and insert actual agents into a hospital for illegal child surgery and escape notice. Yet simultaneously they're complete idiots who don't do the obvious, obvious job #1, job #2, and job #3 of an intelligence agency which is seek to compromise your enemy's intelligence agencies! Duh. It always has been. Counter intelligence and trying to get inside the other agency's decision loops has rich history probably for as long as spying has been done.
Why do you think you can secure this incredibly invasive theoretical network, all evidence from our entire history to the contrary, yet not medical service providers? You've literally built something here that your enemy would desperately love to have! You've done their entire job for them, better than they could! Rather then having to try to compromise endless distributed independently secured private and public organizations, now they just have to compromise a single one and they get the keys to the kingdom.
>Instead, we got HIPAA, and other medical privacy laws/standards, which are aiding literal mass atrocity to continue to proliferate.
This is such schizobabble that makes no sense (HIPAA has nothing to with law enforcement or medical ethics boards or a million other checks on the health system, just for starters) that I don't know what else to do beyond urging you to seek some alternatives to wherever you got this from.
It was always to be, as sure as the exponential meets the linear. I worry though, about all the unborn ideas, innovations and technologies, which could stabilize the current unstable situation, getting aborted by the surveilance which is introducedto "stabilize" things.
This "push to kill privacy" if it exists has been carried out by so-called "tech" companies
European governments are not killing privacy. They cannot legally conduct the sort of mass surveillance done by so-called "tech" companies
If, through "Chat Control" legislation that targets these companies, governments effectively kill the commercial viablity of so-called "tech" companies in Silicon Valley performing intermediation with no legal limits on surveiillance,^1 including offering "chat services", then, in fact, these governments may be restoring privacy that has been lost to Silicon Valley surveillance, whether that is the governments' intention or not
1. If there were legal limits, if users' privacy from so-called "tech" companies was protected by law, then governments could not ask for access to other peoples' "private chats" because there would be no one to ask. Government would have to ask the chat partcipants for their own chats.^2 The Silicon Valley "business model" of unregulated intermediation and surveillance could not exist. It would be illegal
2. In that case, the chat participants could defend themselves. For example reasonable suspicion of illegal activity might be required as grounds to make such requests
No one should believe that Silicon Valley is trying to protect anyone's privacy. Nothing could be further from the truth. Those companies have systematically destroyed privacy for profit at unprecedented scale
Any legislation that targets these companies, such as "Chat Control", may actually improve privacy if it reduces the number of people using those company servers
"In almost every meeting, they would unleash a one-word imprecation to sum up any and all who stood in the way of their master plans.
"Bastards!" Larry would exclaim when a blogger raised concerns about user privacy."
From Douglas Edwards' book I'm Feeling Lucky: Confessions of Google Employee #59 (2011)
Similar books about what goes on inside Meta are actively being supressed
There was a time when the internet existed without these intermediaries
The internet existed before them and it will still exist after them
Only sad? Like, we already lost and we might as well give up?
I’m not sad. I’m scared, and I’m angry. And I’m beginning to think maybe everyone should be too. I mean, in normal circumstances, you don’t want an angry and scared population, that’s generally a recipe for disaster. At this point though, given the various decisions at the top that so clearly disfavour the bottom 99%, angry and scared is probably exactly what we need. Well, angry, mostly. Furious. Mad.
The hard part is determining who the enemy actually is. Hint: the more wealth and power, the more likely this is one of them. Strip them of their ungodly wealth and influence, you may get a human being back.
Like you said in the second part: people don't want to know anymore and just want to watch "game shows". No one is forbidding anything like in the other books. Doom scrolling is peak Fahrenheit.
If you need to point to Anna's Archive for knowledge preservation, then we as a society are not intentionally preserving knowledge, quite the opposite actually.
Maybe a hot take, but I don't know that "privacy" and "anonymity" are the same thing, or that the latter is worth preserving. I would very much like to live in a world where everyone stood by everything they said online with their real identity, just as they already do in the real world.
This was already the case for all of human history until the information age. If you wanted to say something, you had to physically say/print/shout it. And your reputation would be affected as a consequence. This more aligned with how humans are wired - that social actions have social consequences.
If every potential mate and employer was able to review everything you've ever posted online, we'd all be much more careful with what we say, much better able to screen out bad actors, and the wold would be a better place for it.
That works better in a less-connected, more local-bubble-centric world. Back then unless you were expressing something really inflammatory or contrary to a narrow slice of government-opposed ideology (e.g. red scare in the US), you could be spread your opinion mostly freely without too much fear of blowback.
In the modern world, we have governments (and politically aligned lackey-citizens) increasingly actively hunting down anything vaguely dissent-shaped and making those who spoke it suffer in some form, whether than be mass harassment and jawboning or outright muzzling or prosecution.
There’s a chilling effect with growing intensity that pressures people to either obediently nod along or shut up, which makes anonymity (even if only the plausibly deniable sort) important.
I'm not sure I agree, people say unhinged things on TikTok/Facebook using accounts that have their full government name and/or showing face. I doubt deanonymisation would help.
To me "people will be on their best behaviour if they can't be anonymous" sounds eerily similar to Larry Ellison's "people will be on their best behaviour if they're constantly surveilled".
>everyone stood by everything they said online with their real identity
And get Charlie Kirk'ed? No thanks. There are a lot of deranged and demented people out there, and publishing on the internet is rolling that dice billions of times, compared to shouting in the town square.
> If every potential mate and employer was able to review everything you've ever posted online, we'd all be much more careful with what we say, much better able to screen out bad actors, and the wold would be a better place for it.
This is stalking and is illegal. Are there any other crimes you want to claim as righteous?
Presuming you want stalking to be repealed and permissible, you have quite a few bars to pass through.
And in that society, are you willing to have me as your enemy who is very willing to push society to its utter limits? I know I'd be good at it, and I know thousands if not millions of people who share this interest. Because, as you say, its any potential mate/employer.
alright, but the important query is: this isn't happening in a vacuum, there's a lot of various forces.
Lets say the primary force we need to prevent is russian influence campaigns that back and push far right nationalists who will destabilize democracy. Is that a sufficient reason for controls?
It's always curious what people think about the actual content that's typically pushing these things.
>Lets say the primary force we need to prevent is russian influence campaigns that back and push far right nationalists who will destabilize democracy. Is that a sufficient reason for controls?
No. Because if you solve underlying tensions in society the so called russian propaganda has nothing to take hold on.
Also who and under what rules will decide which propaganda is allowed? is American propaganda fine? Chinese? Japanese? UAE?
Not only this creates dissident, and suppresses voices critical of current government. but also gives extraordinary power on level of soviet union to current government.
You might trust current EU to not abuse it, but it might take a single elections, or single term for un-elected(!) officials in EC for attidute to change.
Just like in US - a lot of powers were granted but suddenly there's a person willing to abuse them.
For that to be even considered in EU we would need a lot more check and balances - especially for European Comission and Council.
Another issue is - is EU a trade union or federation? if former - this is outside of EU's responsiblities and powers. if later - look at point above.
If you really wanted to solve this problem you would go after advertisers and data collection companies, and regulate them.
The answer to lies is generally sunshine, not censorship. There are just too many examples of censorship eventually being misused by those in power. The power to censor Russia right now might appear appealing to those in charge, but they need to remember, pro-Russian factions may be voted into power in the future, and they will use this power to suppress information they don't like. Once the precedent is created, it's too late to cry about censorship when it's your "side" which gets censored. No one will care.
To point: I don't accept the premise that the governments gets to decide which information I should be allowed to consume.
Is it a sufficient reason to build a cage for yourself that only needs a single regime flip to turn against you? Is it a sufficient reason to become what you're trying to avoid? Is destabilizing democracy necessary to stop the democracy from being destabilized? No, no, and no.
>russian influence campaigns
Just FYI, your rhetoric precisely mirrors Russian internal rhetoric used to boil the frog 10-15 years ago. If this doesn't make you pause and think, nothing will. In Russia people who fall for it are called "unteachable". Which makes sense, you don't seem to learn anything from their mistakes even though you have a live example of your future that you will reach with 99% certainty, without any help from your boogeymen, because your politicians mirror each step.
And how do you do that? Either you have some government agency able to quickly decide what is a "Russian bot" and censor it or you have a public deliberation process where evidence is required to be presented before censoring the Russian bot. The former is guaranteed to be abused to censor things that the government doesn't like and the latter is too slow to be of any effect.
I don’t think that bot mitigation is nearly the ordeal that the social media giants pose it to be, so long as the desired result is keeping such activity minimized (practical) and not entirely eliminated (impossible), especially in this era of increasingly capable lightweight language models.
Taking Xitter as an example, there are many tells that are visible even to readers with limited info that should be as plain as day to the platform owner. Many are barely even masked. The problem is that for ad supported social media, all incentives align with proliferation of bots, especially if they’re paying you to boost their reach. They’re doing all the hard work of genetically engineering perfectly engaging content for you; who cares about the deleterious effects they’re having on society?
This is why surveillance style adtech must be made into a massive political liability.
Why would Russia be responsible for what corrupt EU officials do?
There is a high chance that corrupt money spreads, which explains
100% of why such laws get in, but I fail to see why Russia should
the only or primary actor be here. There is no real benefit for
Russia here, but there is a LOT of benefit for those who want to
reduce privacy and force transparency onto everyone at all times.
Several US companies come to mind and there is cross-state kick
back going on here even aside from the USA too.
to argue that the success of the far right nationalists is solely off the back of Russian disinformation campaigns ignores the material reality experienced by far right party voters
Are you suggesting that the right (excuse me, FAR right) have valid and meaningful criticisms of the current state of their nations? Sounds like russian bot speak to me. Please report for mandatory re-education.
seems like a lot of people either know way to much about the paradox of tolerance and how to wield it against people's best interest; or know nothing about it.
I am getting somewhat confused about this. That website seems to be equating (semi-?)-reasonable measures with monstrosities such as banning or effectively banning e2ee.
This is going to further increase anti-EU sentiment. This is unacceptable behaviour, but no politician is ever going to experience any negative consequences over this because they're so very far removed from the democratic process.
Most of the time, when "the EU" is doing something bad, it's actually the national governments wearing a different hat. The Parliament is pretty reasonable on the average, while the national policicians in the Council take advantage of the ignorance of the public. They can pursue their favorite policies without consequences, as the EU gets all the blame.
Doesn't matter because Apple will happily implement messages scanning immediately and eagerly. And despite let's say Poland not implementing the bill, all iPhones in Poland will snitch on their owners. Tim Cook's Apple is not Steve Jobs' Apple.
Case in point: my new Mac purchased in Switzerland and activated in Poland on my US Apple account required me to provide my age in the setup assistant. Neither Poland nor Switzerland or the US have this stupid law. Yet Apple is already doing it's part to eliminate my privacy.
Could you clarify what you mean by „required me to provide my age in the setup assistant“? Was is actually required, or optional? Dont they already have your age associated with your iCloud account, or were you creating a new one? Without more details I’m pretty skeptical there is something nefarious here
The issue is that the outcome is the same: whether the Parliament is made up of angels or not, the dealings of the Commission and Council affect the Member States anyway.
The Commission are their appointed civil service and work on whatever agenda is set by the Council (the member states).
Almost everything people complain about coming out of "the EU" originates in the national elected governments.
About the only ones actually protecting the people of the MEPs (the elected EU MPs). They keep shutting this sort of stuff down, and then some member state (mostly Denmark it seems) finds a way to resurrect it again, and again, and again. They only need to succeed once.
I don't disagree with this: I'm saying that unless the power is of the Council and Commission is restrained, all the goodwill of the Parliament is an uphill battle and all people of the Member States are subjected to the corruption of unelected people like Ursula von der Leyden or of (temporarily?) problematic policies of some of the Member States' governments (like Denmark on Chat Control).
As an extension of this, look at the European Commission's response to the Stop Destroying Videogames[0] petition. It's utter dogshit. The petition is a pure consumer protection issue and the Commission's response is "but we can't touch IP rights". Bullshit, you guys made IP rights, you wrote all the rules surrounding them, and Donald Trump is about to drown you with them because America's tech oligarchs figured out your rulebook better than you knew it.
Or, if you think that issue's too niche, look at all the talk of "sovereign clouds". It's almost all "how can we build our own giant polluting AI datacenters" and not "how do we take our data back from the Americans". Because, ultimately, the European Commission is built out of an urge to submit to capital interests. The Epstein class are puppeting the EC in exactly the same way they puppet Donald Trump.
If there is any future in the EU, it will start with abolishing the European Commission to take away the capital class's accountability sink.
[0] For legal reasons, unrelated to Stop Killing Games, but they work together
Well of course it's about building data centers. There are exactly 3 options for you:
1. use "giant polluting AI data centers" in the US or China
2. build "giant polluting AI data centers" in the EU
3. do without modern technology
Option 1 fails at "how do we take our data back from the Americans" and option 3 is insanity and will fail at the ballot box. So get ready for option 2.
> 1. use "giant polluting AI data centers" in the US or China
>
> 2. build "giant polluting AI data centers" in the EU
>
> 3. do without modern technology
I think we need to start brainstorming on options 4 and 5.
Option 2 doesn't make any sense. Europe do not have any strategic advantage here, not the cheap energy, it actually doesn't have the money and it doesn't really have any strong enough capabilities in the hardware or software (yes I know about somes like ASML and open source software). Plus the price of RAM is out of control now.
Usually when you are at a strategic disadvantage you need to start thinking out of the box, or bet on the next thing. AI and "The Cloud" are not gonna be the last technology frontiers, in many ways it might be yesterday bet. It is like buying a stock close to the peak of a bubble.
The Taiwanese did not try to compete Toyota in the 80s, they created TSMC.
Of course do not expect the EU bureaucrats to do be able to do any out of the box thinking.
The EU has a lot of upsides, and it's often been a reason to be optimistic about it as a project, but everyobe has a red line beyond which the upsides don't outweigh the downsides, where the slope becomes too slippery to ignore.
If Chat Control passes, I think lobbying for the exit of your country is going to become a very justifiable position.
Corbyn was famously a Leaver, for the reasons we're observing right now, before aligning his position with his base: a Labour Left UK without the antidemocratic corruption of the EU would arguably have been a better country to live in.
Still, this is mostly pushed by particular countries (e.g. Denmark), the commission and aggressively pursued by lobbyist. The most democratic body in the EU (the EP) has so far always rejected Chat Control.
Without the EU, this would have been introduced in some member countries much earlier (see also UK).
Let it not be forgotten that when Denmark was president of the Council of EU and tried to push this forward, one of the former colleagues/friends of the justice minister was charged with child abuse in 2025. Just search Henrik Sass Larssen and Peter Humeelgaard.
We should start digging into the lives of those pushing for mandated age verification, chat control, and other privacy killing measures to show the world their true face. The public deserves to know who exactly is pushing for the "privacy law for kids" agenda.
I can speak for the sentiment in Denmark: most people are unaware of this legislation. A vocal minority of us (who are a little too online) have been trying to educate people, but I think it feels too esoteric. We had a poll last year which asked, "the ability to detect child abuse is more important than the right to online privacy." 65% of people said yes, 33% said both are equally important, and only 2% said online privacy is more important. The discussion for normal people is often couched in the language of "think of the children." Unfortunately, that appears to be highly effective with the Danes.
To be honest, I'm beginning to suspect most people don't care all that much about privacy if you promise them safety.
>Without the EU, this would have been introduced in some member countries much earlier (see also UK).
And without the EU there'd be some states in which it would never be introduced. Decentralization is what made Europe so successful historically compared to large centralized empires like China and the Ottomans, and the EU is destroying that.
What you call decentralization and „so successful“ resulted in constant wars and conflicts. Europe would be in a way worse place right now without some form of union like the EU
Those constant wars and conflicts were what pushed European countries to develop the military technologies that allowed them to conquer most of the world.
Are you defending colonization, or am I misunderstanding you? When you say conquer, I think you mean invade, genocide, enslave, subject most of the world. We also killed each others for the most petty reasons ever instead of working towards a common goal
Agree. A while ago I met many normies who just complied. Now there is so much legislation that even the normies are starting to ask what is going on. But I guess that of exactly why they now need chat control! To get the herd back to work...
I do not think any amount of surveillance can stop a motivated-enough massive-enough group of citizens interested in having more power over what happens to them. But it will get bloody.
> This is going to further increase anti-EU sentiment.
Rightfully so.
Except for no-roaming-charges within EU, most people can't name one good regulation that came from EU and couldn't be handled individually by their own country in the last few decades. The latest example is 3eur customs tax per every item bought from china, even if it's a 1eur phone case (1eur + 3eur customs + 22% vat on both.... what's the added value of custom tax? who knows, but you pay it anyway). Add all the money wasting, horrible behaviour of politicians in charge, overpaid MEPs for what they do... it's no wonder people hate everything EU related.
There's the lack of customs charges for items from other European countries. The common market is a really big advantage. There's the Euro, and in the past, the EU did a fairly decent job at holding large corporations accountable, although that seems to have disappeared with Neelie Kroes' retirement.
And of course the lack of borders. Being able to go on vacation with no trouble is massive. Do we really want those border checks back?
You didn’t need the EU for the removal of trade barriers and the common market. Both were established quite a while before the EU as we know it now became a thing in the 90s.
> we really want those border checks back
Why? You don’t need to be in the EU to belong to Shengen.
That used to be the case. i.e. if imposing Chat Control on all countries would have required a treaty it would hardly have any chances. However national governments have delegated the right to EU institutions to impose mandatory regulations. You can’t pick and chose anymore.
Norway is not EU, it's EEA, which is more like what you describe (the population rejected joining twice in referendums, but the politicians still wanted some treaties).
The custom thing started from basically the beginning of eu, this wasn't done in the last decades, but the customs chargers for outside stuff have been increased by the EU. The large corporations are not reall accountable, Volkswagen screwed up, americans got buyback programms, hyundai/kia screwed up, americans got gas cards... intel scews up (spectre, no hyperthreading to keep safe), europeans get nothing. And yes, there are border checks within EU, just had to show my ID yesterday on the slovenia-austria border.
Tell me you don't see the value in the tax as a way of discouraging people from ordering a pair of socks from the other side of the globe, while they can buy them locally?
For phone cases, maybe, but not for everything under 150 EUR…
On top of that, local retailers have to comply with EU regulations etc. while Chinese imports are notorious for not following safety/recycling standards etc., which unbalances the playing field away from local retailers anyway.
Where is the rentseeking in that example? Rentseeking is the expenditure of resources to influence the rules so you can charge rent. The sock merchant in the example isn’t.
There are two levels of rentseeking in any tariff example.
The first level is the intended rentseeking: we make imported socks from China more expensive so you buy domestically made socks instead. There are various excusable reasons why you would want to do this, but at the end of the day, we are still assigning the class of people who make socks domestically the ability to charge a supra-competitive price, which is a rent.
The second level is unintended rentseeking. Maybe it turns out the economy really, really doesn't want to fund a domestic sock industry. Maybe our sockmakers are just really, really bad at making socks. Or maybe people really, really want foreign socks. In any of these cases, the people just pay the tariff no matter the cost.
For example, Brazil has had extraordinarily high import tariffs on all sorts of consumer electronics. The intent is to create a domestic electronics industry. The reality is, however, Brazil was never going to be able to support that. Electronics are a highly exportable industry and the global market can only support a few countries being involved in it. So the result is that game consoles and smartphones are just really expensive purely for the benefit of people involved in the tax scheme.
This is global trade and comparative advantage at work. If someone outside the country can produce an equivalent product to what a local producer would make, they can supply it to our market more efficiently than our local producers, and there are no moral qualms (for example people working under conditions that are unacceptable by our standards) then everyone benefits from the import arrangement except for the local producers who can't compete.
From an economic perspective the local producer then needs to become more efficient and/or produce a better product to remain competitive. Alternatively they can do something else that is a more productive use of their time and skills. Again this is just a free market at work. The economic principle is no different if another local producer opened down the road from the existing local producer and they were the ones making the same product cheaper or a better product for the same price.
Protectionism arguably has a place. For vital interests like national defence there is an argument for making certain things locally so you have complete control because of the security implications and because the normal rules of international trade and diplomacy might not be working properly at the time when you need those products. But even in fields like defence and strategic infrastructure and perhaps the most obvious example of simply putting enough food on everyone's plate to survive there are few if any Western nations that don't rely significantly on international trade.
There is an example I always remember from the Brexit debates here in the UK. The Remain campaigners talked a lot about the advantages of being in the EU's Single Market and Customs Union. (These are the two big economic arrangements in the EU that allow member states to trade freely among themselves without tariffs or non-tariff barriers.) And certainly for intra-EU trade they do offer many economic advantages.
However the cost of being under the protectionist umbrella was much less discussed - surprisingly even by Leave campaigners. All member states are required to apply the common EU-based tariffs to anything coming into their country from outside the union. So when the EU introduced extremely high tariffs to protect the fruit growers in its Mediterranean member states that was good for those growers. But we don't exactly grow a lot of citrus fruit in the UK with our milder northern European climate. We also already had some established trade routes with north African nations that could supply similar products at potentially lower cost and would have liked to increase that trade with us - a mutual benefit for both their suppliers and our consumers that would have cost neither of us anything directly. The EU tariffs made that financially unviable and therefore benefitted some of the southern member states but at the expense of both consumers in the UK (also an EU member state at the time!) and the more efficient suppliers from Africa.
Protectionism is inherently inefficient economically. Sometimes it might be appropriate for other reasons but in purely financial terms it's almost always a negative effect.
Because we don't make those socks locally. They come from the other side of the globe.
For example, i want to buy a phone case... i can order one on aliexpress for ~1eur (free shipping) + 3eur tax + 88cents of vat and pay 4.88for it.
Or I can go to my local mall, and buy the identical case, made by the same chinese manufacturer for 12-15eur. The middleman can order 100 of those cases and since they're the same TARIC code, he'll still just pay 3eur (total) in customs for all of them (3% customs, instead of 300% if you order 1 piece only) and still be much more expensive than if I order directly from china.
So instead of paying 1eur + having 4 eur left over to go for a beer, i now pay almost 5eur, no local beer and 75% of that tax doesn't even go to my country but directly into EU budget. I can afford less and won't get anything out of that money. Yes, there's an employee in that cell phone store, but so is there an employee in my local bar where I can't afford beer anymore because EU took my money.
> even if it's a 1eur phone case (1eur + 3eur customs +
That's the fucking point for fuck's sake! Pardon my language, but the entire point of the tariff is to stop people from buying masses of trivial things from the other side of the world, with all the externalities that it entails. This tariff tries to cover at least some fraction of said externalities.
People on HN should not be this clueless about basic economy. This tariff is one of the good things that the EU has done lately, but unfortunately it won't be popular among the common folk who just want their cheap unsustainable stuff without having to think about the consequences.
> That's the fucking point for fuck's sake! Pardon my language, but the entire point of the tariff is to stop people from buying masses of trivial things from the other side of the world, with all the externalities that it entails. This tariff tries to cover at least some fraction of said externalities.
Boy, when you put it that way it makes me wonder why people didn't appreciate the genius of Trump's tarrifs.
Are you kidding me..? The freedom of movement across all member states, including the right to settle and start a business anywhere you like, that's not a "good regulation" to you? Being able to pay in all of those states without paying FX rates, bringing home your purchases across the border without tolls or even checkpoints no less? The funding of a massive amount of public benefit projects in poorer member states, including art and artists, public health and education, infrastructure - all of that isn't worth anything? The ability to trust everything you buy to be safe, from child toys to food to cars? This list goes on for a long time.
Many politicians have used the EU as a convenient scapegoat for inconvenient decisions, and people like you continue to spread completely uninformed FUD.
Let's even put aside all the benefits you have but apparently either don't know or don't care about. How well do you think your home country would fare against the USA or China or Russia on its own? The only weapon all of us have against the big power blocks of the world is being a power block on our own.
The EU isn't perfect, and I'm absolutely opposed to the Chat Control bullshit in its entirety, but don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
I think he is saying all those beneficial things could be done by multilateral agreements without the need for the additional layer of EU organization and bureaucracy. In fact some of them already have been done that way.
If you wanted to come up with individual multilateral agreements to cover even a fraction of what the EU does for its member states, you'd reinvent it in one form or another.
I don't mean this personally, but it appears as though many commenters here have absolutely no clue of how the EU works, what its governing bodies do, and how member states profit off of that.
>The freedom of movement across all member states, including the right to settle and start a business anywhere you like, that's not a "good regulation" to you
That's not regulation, that's a reduction in regulation.
Might make sense to message the MEP's that oppose chat control moreso the ones that support it. Maybe they can use some of their internal influence to sway some people.
I'm pessimistic about the amount of weight these representatives are giving to emails from citizens
Chat control is about controlling peoples life's and minds. The really scary part is how many actually wants this and mindlessly buy into the narrative the EU put forth about why it is needed.
Also worth noting is that this was voted down earlier this year and if im not mistaken also a couple of years ago. But the legislators then just started a new slightly different bill and started nodging their population even harder, and tried again. And again.
The people said no to this.. But apparently that does not matter?! Is this still a democracy?
And are we criticizing totalitarian regimes for surveiling their people and not allowing free speech... And doing this to our own population? It seems so
Bizar to me.
Personally I don't know what to do. I have come to the conclusion that fighting again this is impossible because, in my opinion, no one listens even after a democratic vote as I said already... I'm disgusted by what we have become...
This is so wrong, but here’s another reason: a centralized totalitarian approach could look like a very pragmatic way to exercise control and governance on the population. This is true though only if your technical capabilities are at a similar or higher level of your competitors.
In the European case we have neither the technology advancement of the US, or the supply chain control of China.
This means that a centralized approach is only going to create a larger vulnerability surface for an external attacker.
A decentralized, privacy and security first approach isn’t only right for moral/ethical reasons. It’s the only way we have to defend ourselves, even if we had a fascist government.
You could also view it from the perspective of that if every other major superpower has their mass surveillance and you don't, it becomes an assymetrical informational situation where foreign governments can influence your citizens, but you cannot influence the foreign citizens since they are surveilled and their informational diet is restricted.
In some sense Chat Control is a geopolitical necessity for the EU, there is no choice to not do it.
What's to point of all this? Everyone will use Signal or some other E2E encrypted messenger, this is just bone tossing.
Useless politicans spending time on useless things.
In every authoritarian regime people spent considerable amount of time on workarounds. Underground press, parallel education etc. this is just another iteration of Stasi like regime, just with a nicer suit and better PR.
In reality this should have been rejected wholesale and people proposing this barred from any public sector jobs, or even arrested for terrorist attack attempt (Chat Control fulfils definition of terrorism).
So are they going to ban encrypted email? I am rather sure i could cobble together a chat UI whose backend was just email protocol. It would be needlessly complex, but all that ISPs would see is yet more encrypted email going back and forth.
Amazing how the EU commission does so unashamedly. It's
basically the copy/paste system of the USA here. Big
money wants laws. They have no shame in buying these laws.
Yes the EU was setup as an organization more like the IMF or the World Bank.
Its mandate creeped out over decades and now we are waking up to the authoritarian monster it became.
They setup a fake parliament which is indeed elected through universal suffrage but is only here to adopt legislations proposed by the Commission.
Since citizen do not elect the Comission this has nothing to do with a democracy.
Here on HN, people fully understand how bad and unfit Chat Control is. But keep in mind the EU has been passing legislations like this for decades and in every domains.
For every good one (like mandating USB-C) you get 9 bad ones.
plenty of people desire something like this, and 'saving the children' is their genuine intent and desire. Humanity is willing to shoot itself in the foot again and again, there's no need for it to be some shadowy cabal.
Plenty of people do want more surveillance, but that's not why EU politicians are doing this. Seeking to implement surveillance across an entire continent cannot be explained by "the will of the people". Danes might want surveillance for their children, but I can't imagine them lobbying their EU representatives to also protect the children in France as well.
This is bullshit. The EU parliament is the organ that shot it down so far.
Read the article. It is the national governments pushing this shit. They try to launder if through the EU because passing those legislations locally would likely be very unpopular.
By observation, the purpose governments is to run scams.
After all, it makes no sense to attribute their purpose to things they consistently fail to do.
I think the EU thinks that opposition to the EU must be from foreign actors. This is why citizens has to be surveiled so that the EU can catch the foreign actors or some goofy crap like that.
My point being that the opposition to the EU comes from EU citizens of the EU... Because the EU make stuff like chat control...
Or it could be we have fully crossed over into stasi territory already and they are having a great cozy party while they make life more and more unbearable for the population?!
I have to admit that I don't understand how they can push for this so often! Wasn't this rejected not so long ago?
The common fallacy people have regarding chat control (and should be clarified) is that it's not like internet is made of a few select providers, anyone can open an encrypted tcp connection from an ip to another, and the global traffic is too massive to be scrutinized, also the most widely available apps already comply to the single police request to access conversations from suspects. This means that this will create further privacy for criminals such as pedophiles and mass espionage for the common man. It's also curious to notice that at every proposal stage, politicians are always conveniently exempt from the regulation, which is hilarious coming after the Files.
Yeah but messaging apps are really only useful if there are lots of people on them to message.
So in the real world a relatively small number of providers, WhatsApp, Signal etc, are in a position where all your friends are going to be on them. And those are the ones likely to be named and told they need to implement image scanning/review.
Messaging protocols are useful even if everyone is not on the same app. In the past I was chatting with my google using friend via some third party jabber server where I had an account. It was useful and didn't require us to be "in the same app". We both were using both different apps and different server providers.
But actual protocols are so last century. You might have to think ahead for fifteen minutes because the design has to be staaaa-a-ble. It's haa-a-ard! And you can't sell out to somebody who'll change it and have an exit event.
Just 4 countries are against: Czech Republic, Italy, Netherlands, and Poland.
https://fightchatcontrol.eu/
There's a lot of flip-flopping. I'm surprised Italy changed their mind when they were very in favour until recently.
Does governments have any say in this? If not then most MEPs of mentioned countries are too in favor of Chat Control. This is what it says when you click on one of the 4 countries.
Related recent discussion:
>European Commission's Metsola Overrides MEPs to Force Through Chat Control
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48657675 (45 comments)
Instead of the usual knee-jerk it would be nice to see some level-header analysis on mechanics of these things - who pays for the time of the people that decide to push this particular piece of legislation, how they manage to get into the door, who personally makes the proposal, how they gather support for it.
Robert Metsola met Ashton Kutcher (co-founder of Thorn, which develops message scanning tech) in March 2023 and posted a photo on Instagram. Kutcher lobbied MEPs hard in favour of strong detection measures.
Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore (no joke).
Law enforcement at all levels traditionally has a strong lobbying presence. Their public affairs departments are well-funded and do not cease operations just because some initiatives are delayed due to temporary push back. Transparency legislation often does not apply to their efforts either.
Wait, law enforcement is part of the government. Why is there not a push to zero out their funding for lobbying?
Europol lobbies this with tax euros:
Overcoming the complex challenges outlined above requires multifaceted policy considerations that focus on both societal resilience and enabling effective law enforcement within the EU’s robust legal framework. Key actions should include:
Establishing lawful access by design to E2EE communication channels in cooperation with service providers and regulators.
https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/stea...
First, why does the EU leadership refuse to learn from falling behind the US economically and technologically, most starkly with AI recently, and their failures in regulating the Internet, most annoyingly the cookie law? And why aren't you, the EU citizen, more annoyed by it? I see a lot of pro-EU content on this site when they're terrible on both tech and entrepreneurship.
Second, what's up with Denmmark pushing for it here? They're usually very reasonable.
Denmark have been pushing for chat control for a long time.
The American view of the EU is very much a grass is greener one. They see the things that are better than in the US but not the things that are worse.
Yes, I know they've been pushing for this when they're pretty reasonable and independent on other issues. How come?
Ar they, though? The established longterm consensus is pretty reasonable in the EU, it’s not self evident that things have been going in the right direction on the whole in recent years.
Is it?
The green deal stuff seems to be pretty bad. Manufacturing seems to have a hard time. The next tier economy, e.g. AI, is not seen on the horizon. Over-the-top regulations for agriculture and then opening up the market from goods where such regulations don't exist does not seem smart either.
And there're lots and lots of small things like those.
Yeah, I meant mostly the 80s and 90s (i.e. the period when the Western European countries were able to keep up with the US or ever narrow the gap). Since then they have just been coasting on top of that.
Denmark is a world leading producer of windmills
I don't want to enter into conspiracy territory, but it seems that there's a big insistence from whomever is behind pushing for this to pass at any cost. First it was Denmark, now the EU parliament president, a Maltese. What's for certain is that those that stand to benefit massively are governments and politicians themselves.
And no, it's certainly not that bullshit astroturfed story that has been going around, of Meta behind this concerted effort across the Western world because they're too lazy to validate one's age.
How would members of the EP benefit from Chat Control?
They would be exempt, along with military and intelligence personnel. So they can enact mass surveillance, stop any form of dissent before it has a chance to grow, while themselves remaining above the law.
https://europeanpirates.eu/chatcontrol-eu-ministers-want-to-...
Some sort of perverse inclinations of controlling other people’s lives and knowing what’s “better” for them. Delusional and narcissistic people seem to be generally significantly over represented in politics (another demographic is useful idiots, put those two together and well..)
Not sure what OP meant, but they talked about goverments and "politicians" rather than EP specifically.
I think several EU governments want chat control paving the way for domestic surveillance. Though I don't consider that conspiracy theory really. Last years, there have been big scandal cases with use of pegasus, predator and similar spy software from several EU governments for domestic surveillance (eg Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Spain). The issue is that legal surveillance, the regular phone tapping kind, is inefficient due to people using E2EE chat apps rather than regular phone calls and SMS. There is no legal basis for the more advanced spyware afaik, so these surveillance cases were illegal and kinda "off the books", even though rather widespread. A legal way to surveil the people would be welcome to those who did that and those who want to do the same.
https://privatecitizen.press/episode/160/
I'm completely serious here; the former minister of law was beaten as a child and it informs his whole world view.
That can make a lot of sense. People do tent to put too much value on their own experience - there is a tendency to think your experiences are normal.
The population doesn’t support chat control. The European Parliament rejected the chat control proposal earlier this year. Now it seems that the European Parliament president is trying to bypass that
Well put
I think Denmark is one of the most surveiled countries. And with the most compliant population. They call it trust... Denmark is not the fairytale they try to market them selves as. This is closer to their true color in my opinion. You could also try to look up the cases with former and current politicians in dk who actually have gotten caught perpetrating the very thing chat control is said to stop.
I'm to afraid of the f'ing EU to mention specific names here... But maybe some braver souls will
Denmark’s recent reasonableness is somewhat of a historical aberration if you look at their history. The migrant crisis (and the failure of governments to address it) has stirred up some ugly things there.
What do you mean the migrant crisis stirred up things? The anti immigration position in danish politics has been a winning position since the mid 00's.
As the crisis has worsened across Europe, Denmark started unbelievably intrusive AI-enabled mass surveillance of welfare recipients (almost 15% of the population), dangerous infrastructure which could be applied to the population as a whole. And I’d argue that fears over migrant-driven crime are what allowed Denmark’s politicians to push for Chat Control in the first place.
Yeah no I don't buy that, and have never heard that angle before. Surveillance in Denmark is much older than that. Since the personal ID number was rolled out in 1968 its been one long process of integrating public systems with each other to surveil and control. Surveillance of welfare recipients started getting serious in the 00's too. The migrant crisis drove polices like the confiscations of jewelry from foreigners, and public funded commercials in the middle east telling people to stay away.
Internally chat control and migration are never talked about together. Chat control has no leverage on migration in Denmark. Its not a factor that would change anything. It's all about international treaties making it impossible to send people out of the country forcefully. That's the policy the migrant crisis really ignited.
I'd say the AI powered aspects of it is whats troubling.
We know how trustable ai outputs are, and now govts' are ready to let the AI's control their people?
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/11/denmark-ai-po...
Sounds like you would know more on this, then, I had heard that there was a link between Chat Control and migration. I was also unfamiliar with Denmark’s long history of surveillance, as I’d literally never heard of this being an issue there until recently—but I do not live there. Thank you for the correction.
Edit: this in no way should be read to condone Denmark’s position here.
Dane here, I don't think there is much of a link. The government is usually pragmatic about security, and has long leaned into technology to achieve it.
What is funny is that it has been pushed by the social democrats. See also what Labour have been doing in UK.
Whatever we call centre-left today we would have placed much further to right a couple decades ago. At this point even the US Democrats are more progressive than our EU "liberal" parties.
The whole left vs right is a useless caricature. And it’s especially meaningless when comparing ideologies across country borders. Better talk in terms of policies.
Remember it's also coming for you:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/kids-act-would-require...
> The KIDS Act Regulates Private Messages, Too
While the EU is not perfect and surely needs improvement in many areas, it is still better than not having it. This is why you see a lot of pro-EU content: many people here (myself included) are of the opinion that the EU needs to be improved, not dismantled.
Yes, you are right, the only two possible choices are to either give the government an absolute mandate to spy on every citizen, or to abolish the EU altogether, no other option is possible.
>While the EU is not perfect and surely needs improvement in many areas, it is still better than not having it.
Would you still believe this if Chat Control got though? What good did the EU bring that's good enough to make up for the badness of everyone in Europe having all their private digital communications constantly scanned?
If Chat Control gets through, it means the Parliament approved it, which means the EU people voted for politicians that supported the idea. If the EU got dismantled, the same politicians would be elected (they won once why not twice) and do it again at the local level. (though, maybe not in every country)
> Would you still believe this if Chat Control got though?
Chat Control is being pushed by member states. The people who keep saving you are the MEPs (elected EU MPs).
You would most likely already have chat control if you were not in the EU. All governments around the world are pushing for this.
Yes, definitely. Just as an example, my country wouldn't have a lot of consumer protection laws we now have thanks to the EU. As a concrete example, there used to be a single phone service provider acting as a monopolist and we had the highest phone bills in the EU. When this started to change, it still wasn't possible to keep the same phone number when switching providers, which is a huge thing for businesses and freelancers. The EU forced our government to change this. And I'm not even talking about all the financial help that we got from the EU. Which, admittedly, was used poorly by my politicians. But this isn't the EU's fault, it's their fault.
> What good did the EU bring that's good enough to make up for the badness of everyone in Europe having all their private digital communications constantly scanned?
Peace in Europe. You have to remember that the EU is fundamentally the world's most successful peace project, founded after the horrors of WW2 to make war in Europe not just unthinkable, but materially impossible.
Before the EU, we had centuries of constantly being at each others throats. There hasn't been armed conflict between EU members and there won't be for as long as it exists. It worked. It broke the cycle of generation after generation of horrible slaughter.
Chat Control is obviously bad. But fundamentally, the good of peace outweighs even that.
However, one should also note that Chat Control is pushed by the member states and their representatives - the EU is actually the institution that's kept it at bay so far.
> You have to remember that the EU is fundamentally the world's most successful peace project, founded after the horrors of WW2 to make war in Europe not just unthinkable, but materially impossible.
You're confusing the EU with NATO. Germany is already planning on re-arming[^1] because NATO is dead. The EU is by all means an unfinished project and if I had to bet, I would bet that it won't survive the next two decades. There's no pro-EU majority in any European country right now. Not one. It's a great idea, very poorly implement that gets (some times unfairly, some times fairly) all the blame for everything wrong with Europe right now. Migration, energy, housing, etc.
[1^]: https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2026/04/22/germany...
> You're confusing the EU with NATO
I am not. See the Schuman Declaration [0] for context on why the EU came to be.
> It proposes that Franco-German production of coal and steel as a whole be placed under a common High Authority, within the framework of an organization open to the participation of the other countries of Europe. The pooling of coal and steel production should immediately provide for the setting up of common foundations for economic development as a first step in the federation of Europe, and will change the destinies of those regions which have long been devoted to the manufacture of munitions of war, of which they have been the most constant victims.
> The solidarity in production thus established will make it plain that any war between France and Germany becomes not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible. The setting up of this powerful productive unit, open to all countries willing to take part and bound ultimately to provide all the member countries with the basic elements of industrial production on the same terms, will lay a true foundation for their economic unification.
> There's no pro-EU majority in any European country right now. Not one.
That couldn't be further from the truth.
* Pew Research, May 2026: Majorities in eight of the 10 countries (surveyed) currently have a positive opinion of the EU. [1]
* Gallup, March 2025: No country approves of their own leadership, or that of U.S., over the EU [2]
[0] https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-histor...
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/05/28/in-severa...
[2] https://news.gallup.com/poll/657860/member-states-show-stron...
> most annoying the cookie law
Also, the least consequential even ignoring often stated fact that cookie banners are malicious compliance. I care much less about cookie banners than about the ads, and for both of I have uBlock origin filters. So, what to be angry about exactly?
And either 80% of banners are not respecting the law, or the law managed to omit mandating making it as easy to reject as accept... Rejecting usually require you to enter into settings and sometimes click "reject" for every individual partner(!)
That was the case in the beginning, for a while. Now I rarely see even ones where I have to click Settings and Reject all, usually it's just Accept all and Accept only essential. No dark patterns just two equally visible buttons. Often also just "We use only essential cookies" and OK button because they don't have 1138 partners they want to sell your data to
And in the latter case, they could even not put any banner at all and still be compliant. The GDPR requires consent only for tracking.
"Cookie banners are malicious compliance" is starting to wear thin as an excuse. GDPR went into law in 2018, almost ten years ago and for almost as long websites have been "maliciously complying". If you don't don anything about it at some point it's not malicious anymore, it's just how the law is meant to be interpreted.
I have a different hypothesis for why the GDPR exists: it is to create a market for EU based compliance companies.
> And why aren't you, the EU citizen, more annoyed by it?
Because the USA tends to privilege corporations over people whereas in the EU it's more balanced (still pretty biased towards corps, though), and I am a people, not a corporations.
Take, for example, the 'cookie law': I much prefer being annoyed by the cookie pop-up over websites shoving a ton of unnecessary and unwanted cookies onto my computer without permission.
...speaking of which:
> and their failures in regulating the Internet
Which political entity would you say has done the best job in regulating the Internet? Where are citizens most protected from being inundated with advertising, unwanted cookies, unnecessary JavaScript, false news, scams, and all the other garbage one is normally subjected to when not putting in some amount of effort in combating that shit?
And because you are grateful for the cookie policies you don’t mind rewarding them with unlimited access all your private communication? I don’t really follow this argument..
> would you say has done the best job in regulating the Internet
So again.. how do these basic/superficial (or even if they are extremely effective and useful, that doesn’t really change anything) regulations justify mass surveillance?
> false news
For what its worth in no way has the EU been effective in doing anything about this (I’m not sure they even tried doing anything that directly addressed it?)
> And because you are grateful for the cookie policies you don’t mind rewarding them with unlimited access all your private communication?
No. Where do you even come up with this stuff?
> So again.. how do these basic/superficial (or even if they are extremely effective and useful, that doesn’t really change anything) regulations justify mass surveillance?
Answering a question with a question only works if the question used as answer is a simpler way of getting the answer to the original question.
> For what its worth in no way has the EU been effective in doing anything about [fake news]
Okay, so which country/state/union/whatever has been effective in doing anything about it? Because according to the post I responded to there is someone way better at regulating the Internet than the EU is, so I'm wondering who it is.
Remember that scandal about that subcontractor for Apple which installed suicide nets after thirteen workers died and another five attempted suicide by jumping off buildings? But no, corporations good, government bad. At least when it comes to government I get to vote. Even better: I'm Belgian, I HAVE to vote, it's not just a right, it's a civic duty. What, when it comes to corporations I can 'vote with my wallet'? I'm sure Apple, whose profits exceed those of some developed countries, will surely change their ways if I boycott them over stuff like the Uyghur slave shops.
Also:
> I’d rather have that instead of govt monitoring of all communications.
False dilemma, you can have neither. But sure, EU bad because you're not allowed to deny the Holocaust or call for the extermination of Jews/Muslims/the gays/...
> What, when it comes to corporations I can 'vote with my wallet'? I'm sure Apple, whose profits exceed those of some developed countries, will surely change their ways if I boycott them over stuff like the Uyghur slave shops.
Your argument is that voting with your wallet doesn't change things even if it reduces the profits of the company by an amount proportional to the number of people who do it, but voting in an election does where not only is your vote is still diluted by millions of other people, the result is all-or-nothing and the party/candidate doing the thing you didn't like can still retain full control of the government even after losing a couple percent of the vote?
It's the same problem in both cases. What you need is enough viable alternatives that you can pick the one doing the right thing instead of being given a fake choice between two or three "alternatives" that are all doing the wrong thing. And markets with hundreds of competitors are a lot more common than elections with hundreds of candidates/parties on the ballot.
One big thing you need a government to actually do is break up consolidated markets, and the current ones are evidently ineffective at it.
All of those are either illegal already (scams) or easily avoidable without regulation.
European here. I like the cookie law. It's made it clear to people how much we're being tracked and I can choose to opt out. The implementation could of course be better but the real issue is the scummy web devs choosing to make it as annoying as possible instead of taking the more sensible decision to not have 150 trackers on every page.
>> I see a lot of pro-EU content on this site when they're terrible on both tech and entrepreneurship.
Life is bigger than tech or entrepreneurship. In the 00's I dreamed of moving to the US. That's changed, especially over the last decade. If I was offered a huge salary tomorrow to work in the US I would turn it down.
Website operators hate these cookies popups because they make their website more annoying and make me more likely to press the back button and click on a different website. As it should be. This incentivizes them to stop tracking me.
Why then do they make the most annoying, user-hostile dark pattern cookie banners they can come up with? No, website operators hate that they have to either stop spamming thousands of tracker scripts or put up a banner.
They found out that they can offload blame on the EU instead and so have chosen to make the web as annoying as possible.
Yeah, that's more the point; in discussions with clients I very often get asked how far we can go without any consent. Most companies want all the privacy ignoring stuff and they don't want to tell their users about it.
Realistically you won't be caught analyzing server-side logs of things the client is doing anyway, even if you don't follow GDPR rules with those logs. But they want Google Analytics, right?
Most of them don’t care and just integrate whatever is the most common cookie banner widget because their legal team asked them to
The solution to that one is pretty simple, simply don't collect information you don't need, and you can avoid the banner altogether! Github manages to not have banners, it's not because of magic.
There is no obligation to put a banner of you don't sell your users' data to third parties. The law is very clear that your don't need it for period technical cookies, so it's really always and every time solely about tracking and advertisement money.
You do need it for analytics though, or any other non-essential purpose.
You could probably argue self-hosted, privacy-preserving analytics is a "legitimate business purpose" so doesn't need consent. AFAIK it's because you're sending user data to Google that you normally need consent for GA.
99% of the people just click accept and go through.
This could be solved on the client side, by requiring all devices with browsers sold in EU to have separate cookie jars per domain and by default those cookies would be deleted on window/tab close. If you wanted to stay logged in to a site, you'd click a button next to the url bar that says "keep cookies for this domain", and be done.
Cookies have literally nothing to do with GDPR or the ePrivacy directive. It is mentioned I think twice total in both documents as an example of how user data is persisted and tracked across domains, but ultimately the mechanism is irrelevant.
So you like the law, but don't like how it didn't actually solve the problem it was trying to solve?
I assume you're pretty well read up on matters of privacy, right? So you have a better awareness and understanding. But do you believe the average person does? Or would you assume that the average person has either been trained to ignore the banner, automatically consent to more invasive tracking, or is generally more confused about why the banner exists, or what it does?
The cookie consent law is the dumbest application of an attempt to improve privacy. It's made the internet worse, and is being used to train people into consenting to giving away their privacy without thinking... because: "clicking accept is what you have to do to use the page" -- every normal person casually browsing any site.
No implementation for cookie based consent can be done correctly.
Personally, I'd love to see a law that makes any/all dark patterns a crime, and empowers state prosecutors via grand jury to bring charges for them against both the company, and individual authors of the specific commits as jointly responsible. I don't want statutory laws, I want a trial jury to look at it, and decide if any technological measure, pattern, tactic, procedure, design, or measurement was used to encourage one decision over the other instead of a fair choice.
I don't want a set of rules that given enough funding any company is able to win as a negative sum game. I want a jury, not a trailing clause, to decide if the company is clearly acting in good faith or worthy of apocalyptic fines.
> So you like the law, but don't like how it didn't actually solve the problem it was trying to solve?
(Not the person you replied to)
I'm not sure where all of this is coming from, the law is actually extremely obvious and useful: you want to track people, they have to be informed, and have to consent. The law says nothing about how, and the way it was implemented was entirely up to the corporations discretion, which of course opted for the most malicious terrible way to do it, but they did it.
The purpose of the law was that people should be informed about cookies being installed and consent to that happening.
Do you feel like people are now aware that cookies are being installed, more so than before the banner? Do people understand that they are consenting to this?
That is the law at work.
Everything above and beyond that is nice to have, and I'm sure the world would be better for it, but without the EU, people probably wouldn't even know what cookies were, let alone understand (or have control over) how they are being tracked.
If that's not a net positive in a world where net-negatives happen every week, I don't know.
> I don't want a set of rules that given enough funding any company is able to win as a negative sum game. I want a jury, not a trailing clause, to decide if the company is clearly acting in good faith or worthy of apocalyptic fines.
You want the winner to be the side with more expensive lawyers who use psychological manipulation techniques against a jury?
In general juries are the finders of fact. They decide what happened, e.g. who is lying. Judges decide the law, i.e. whether the thing the jury says they did is a violation of the law.
What you're asking for is to have the jury decide what the law is. There are a lot of problems with that, but one of the big ones is that jury determinations don't have to follow precedent and, unless you want judges ultimately deciding it anyway, can't really be appealed. Which would result in zillions of spurious lawsuits against innocent people because a small percentage of them would win big at random.
> falling behind the US economically and technologically
Are you even human? Do you really believe what you say? Doesn't it come across as absurd, from everything that happened to the US since the Snowden revelations, the Patriot Act, spiraling into fascism, a first time attacking science and democracy, a second time to install oligarchs, traitors, corrupt and incompetents to run the state, with the result of tanking your real economy (on every metric that's not related to AI), burning down your soft power, burning bridges with every ally, losing the war against Iran, and causing a generational talent exodus out of the US?
Oh yeah, by no means am I blindly defending "the EU leadership", but some reality check is much needed.
At least there’s free speech and people are not arrested for mean memes (as is the case in UK and Germany). Burning bridges with “allies” which were taking advantage of you?
Didn't we just have a round of people being fired and arrested in the US for saying mean things about Charlie Kirk?
This gets brought up a lot, and I’m not sure how to explain it. But inconsequential complete free speech is not the top issue for some people. People have different priorities.
And at least people are not shot in the streets by the police for protesting...
Well no.. just handcuffed and left to die after being stabbed (while the perpetrators face no consequences).
> (while the perpetrators face no consequences).
Bullshit!
Vickrum Digwa, the perpetrator of that crime, was jailed for life with a minimum sentence review time of 21 years.
What's more it's thought that sentence is unduly lenient so it's being reviewed to make is stronger.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1d2w411rgro
as long as your mean memes aren't against the POTUS ;)
Europe is over all far more democratic and safer then USA. Including people actually being safer when they speak.
> free speech
Democracy only works well when the populace is properly informed and it's much easier for someone to tell a lie than for someone else to disprove that lie. Think of the Alex Jones Sandy Hook hoax conspiracy hypothesis.
Right now people in the US are being designated as terrorist for being against the government.
And people are literally arrested for touching a pool
A group of protesters got 50 years in jail for daring to exercise their constitutional duty against ICE illegally detaining citizens. Meanwhile the J6 thugs all got pardonned by the literal pedophile in office, and not a single Epstein victim got any justice.
Why does any country or bloc need to learn lessons about "falling behind" the US?
Why is that the yard stick?
I certainly don't spend all day dreaming of F150s, McMansions, the psychopaths leading silicon valley, 9 lane highways, US style PE, and world-class fascist politicians such as Trump
Dear lord
A couple of decades ago both France and Britain had higher per capita GDP than the US. Now they are significantly behind.
Similarly top European companies used to rival American companies in profitability, power and valuation. There’s not really an equivalent of FAANG/ NVIDIA in Europe, just ASML and LVMH.
It's not like we can do anything. We don't have democracy - we can't vote on issues and we (in most countries) can't even vote on people. We just vote on 2-3 non-fringe parties and they choose people and policies. You may formally put an X next to some name but it's just a chosen party official. They need to walk party line and be in good standings with the leadership to even get on the list.
There is just nothing you can do really in that system other than pursue career in politics which is a no-go for most people for obvious reasons.
Yeah, we can: I am from Poland and precisely through this mechanism our MEPs/delegates/nominates know that supporting this would be a disaster for their political group right here back home regardless of direct voting.
Only Switzerland has a true democracy
We also have representatives. We call it semi-direct democratic system. There is no such thing as a „true democracy“, it’s a set of principles
>> We don't have democracy - we can't vote on issues
This is how democracy works pretty much everywhere. You vote for parties or people based on their policies.
The problem with the EU is that there are many levels of abstraction, and the more links in a chain the more susceptible to corruption it is.
This becomes immediately obvious when you vote for a party who fails to fulfill, or even go against their policies. Then for the EU there’s an additional level of abstraction for the commission. At this level, the voter is far removed from their initial vote and are completely powerless.
There are too many levels of indirection. At least in some countries you can vote on a person representing your town/area. This is one level of indirection less and allows people who aren't just chosen party members to win and then they have incentives to help the region.
In "standard" party democracy there is just nothing that can be done. Calling it democracy as in rule of the people is a disgrace.
The education system has failed in the EU, but in a different way than it has in the US.
I realised this when people thought mandating the USB-C connections was a good idea because "it is the best standard". I didn't think the mandated connector was a huge deal per se, but it made it clear to me that there is a flawed thought process behind EU regulations. And this is a big deal.
Many things are not really understood in the EU. The majority don't seem to understand free speech. The EU has an article about free speech that clearly states there is no free speech, but people point to it when they claim there is.
Of all things to criticise, you pick out the one ruling that eventually lead to a consolidation of chargers? Really? I haven't ever met a single person who wasn't grateful of being able to have one cable for all their devices.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. A short-term view of the world, progress and technology.
All my devices supported USB-C before the EU regulation. But if I wanted to buy a device with a new type of connector, I should have been able to. This is how the USB-C came to be and how any new standard in hardware happens. New technologies are made and just sold, and if they are proven to be superior to others in the market, they often become standards.
The USB-C standard is not the best standard that can exist from now to the end of the universe, but if this discovery process is blocked, we will be stuck with it forever, which, of course, will also constrain the design and engineering of devices in other ways.
It's the same fundamental flawed thought process that has made the EU reliant on the US for a lot of services.
> All my devices supported USB-C before the EU regulation.
I don't have this particular problem so it doesn't exist!
It did exist for huge amounts of people. At the time, many manufacturers had proprietary plugs and would still have them if it weren't for this decision.
> The USB-C standard is not the best standard that can exist from now to the end of the universe
Which is why the law can be simply amended as soon as such a standard emerges. If the industry figures out something better than USB-C, pressure will build on the council to do so. This is nothing but a straw man.
> I don't have this particular problem, so it doesn't exist!
No, what I said is that you could find devices with USB-C in all the categories that are now regulated. This means it was pretty easy to find devices like that if you really valued USB-C. Of course, if you wanted an iPhone but you liked USB-C, you would have had a problem. A problem that is much less worse than blocking progress.
> Which is why the law can be simply amended as soon as such a standard emerges. If the industry figures out something better than USB-C, pressure will build on the council to do so. This is nothing but a straw man.
You totally ignored what I wrote, or you didn't understand it. No standard can emerge if you can't test it on the market. You can have a bureaucrat choose the next one from some proposal. It's not the same.
You might have a point. But, at the same time, AFAIK the only manufacturer that complained about USB-C (and, coincidentally, making the exact same argument as you're making) was Apple. And they definitely weren't interested in making the lightning connector an industry standard. Quite the opposite.
It doesn't really matter to me, because even if that's true for Apple (or it was at the time), it still means other companies can't test new technologies. They might as well be OK with that, but it still means that consumers won't get new standards. The first attempt at enforcing such a standard in the EU was made with mini-USB.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/memo_1...
It failed to become a regulation (fortunately), but I have no reason to believe USB-C is different, and no better standards would have been tried by companies if they were allowed to do so.
On the other hand, USB-C wouldn't have become a true standard if no-one forced Apple's hand. It's a compromise and, for the time being, I'm happy with this. As another commenter noted, if we feel the need for a new standard the law can be changed in the future. I concede that, depending on the future's situation, this could be difficult to do. But, without such law we wouldn't have had a standard to begin with.
> On the other hand, USB-C wouldn't have become a true standard if no-one forced Apple's hand
I don't want a state-dictated standard like this. What you're saying is that because some people want iPhones and they want them with USB-C, everyone else must forgo the possibility of having a better type of connetor until "we" (Is it the majority? I don't even think the majority uses iPhones in Europe) feel like having a new one (at which point the progress has been delayed anyway and you'll also get the initial problem again). I find the premise quite capricious.
> simply amended as soon as such a standard emerges
That statement just makes no sense. How can a new standard emerge when legally there is no option to validate its actually superior in the market?
> figures out something better
That’s not how it works. Most innovation does not occur in committees but through trial and error.
Same as before? A group like Intel, Microsoft and a few more create a new standard and can get the eu to adopt it. Which popular cabling standard wasn't designed by one of the big ones?
Well you are ignoring what I or the other comment replied almost entirely.
There were many competing standards and it took quite a while for the market to converge on usb-c and only then when it was already the most popular connector by far did EU determine it was the “best” standard.
Firewire, Thunderbolt 1, all kinds of different usb type ports where designed by various groups of companies it was not self evident that they will fail in the market at that point.
No industry group let alone an EU committee can know what will fail or succeed in advance its just an absurd assumption that it could ever be otherwise.
People are getting real EU fatigue from both sides of the spectrum. The attacks on privacy are the most concerning, the members of the high level group pushing for ChatControl and other surveillance state measures are still anonymous, while the Commissioner's Pfizer chats are still nowhere to be found--not that they would be subjected to the same surveillance as the little people. The needs of those bureaucrats sitting in their glass windowed buildings--with AC still running on their tallest floors where the commission staff works, while shut down on the lower ones--clearly do not match what the average person wants or expects. How much can they push it further? They're only adding fuel to the fire that will replace them with something just as bad, if not worse. It's hard not to be skeptical considering the exceptional level of lobbying steering regulations. The latest is the utterly idiotic, anti-consumer de minimis threshold changes, with an incomprehensible "per category" fee on every purchase outside the EU, lobbied for by EuroCommerce, killing entire hobbyist fields (e.g. anything to do with electronics) in the continent.
And people are surprised of the rise of far right, especially anti EU one
A blanket control affecting privacy would be bad. However we need controls that can prevent criminals from hiding behind anonymity and being able to organize massive activities just with a few online posts. These days it is trivial to organize and radicalize the youth into wrong paths overnight using social channels. You just need to say something that aligns with their problems, and most people get consumed by the divisive speech easily.
The effect is already seen how the ability of rioters far exceeds that of the authorities during recent incidents in UK and other places. Something need to be done for this.
Criminals will just side-step the law and use methods of communication that allow them carry on committing crimes.
If it was possible to outlaw crime we would have no crime already. We had riots in 70s, 80s and 90s too after all.
Meanwhile politicians get to strip the innocent of their privacy, which is very handy for them.
1. They are criminals. Criminals are not bound by laws. 2. Trying to reduce anonymity to go after criminals, simply means giving up anonymity for all but the criminals. See point 1 ... Criminals do not care and will find ways to not get caught. 3. I find the idea of this blanked statement that protesters are criminals insane dangerous and smells of authoritarianism. Peaceful protesters are just that, peaceful. Those that do crimes during protests, are criminals who can be literally caught. 4. The issue of "ability of rioters far exceeds that of the authorities", is more that the authorities do not have their ducks in a row. Blanked mass surveillance is not the solution. 5. Where does it stop? A what point are we running Russia like Max surveillance software on our smartphones, tracking where we go, who we talk too, ... all in the name of catching maybe, some criminals.
> Something need to be done for this.
Its called a better and responsive police force.
> radicalize the youth into wrong paths overnight using social channels
Imaging, that those people who radicalize youth are, ... not using social channel to do so. Wait, ... how did most of the people who ended up going to Syria get radicalized? Most was not via social media, it was with direct contact. Do we ban social contact?
This is just the typical quick fix type of answer. Problem, must be X. No, lets not invest money into police, social councils, case workers, etc...
Thing is, we have seen police getting lazy because, hey, why do investigation work if we can just get free evidence from criminals phones. O, those criminals now encrypted / try to hide data. Ok, so we now need to make it illegal because screw society, we want easier jobs.
No, everybody needs to give up their privacy "for the greater good". You must have something to hide, if you do not let the government read what you wrote, today, yesterday, 10 years ago ...
Have you ever been to China or other countries where saying the wrong thing, can be unpleasant to life changing? Where people learn to not talk what they rally think outside their little family corner. Where corruption is rampant because nobody can protest. Remember, today its your criminal protesters, tomorrow if a government changed into one you do not like, you become the criminal protester.
The right answer is a better funded and accountable police / social structure / help systems. And accountability, to ensure proper policing.
Not step by step removal of privacy.
> No, everybody needs to give up their privacy "for the greater good"
You can bargain (via voting) about how much of the stuff you need to forgo. But you can't have 100% privacy, if the nation has to function.
You don't need to give up any privacy at all, if you don't expect anything from government. But the concept of a nation is hinged upon it's citizens foregoing a bit of privacy, a bit of their income, a bit of their freedom. The nation imposes rules that you need to follow (loss of freedom), asks you to pay up taxes and makes your identity linked to the citizen services.
The nation comes into existences precisely from the things that you forego.
Respectfuly, that's an impressive load of bullshit.
Two cases in point:
- UK's Farage recently causing riots, destruction of property, arson and bringing harm to non-whites, intentionally, previously being openly supported and amplified by Musk.
- USA's lame duck president Trump causing January 6, 2021 riots ending up in destruction of property and killings of five people (including Capitol police officer)
The perpetrators causing the shit are very well known, their followers do not try to hide themselves, and no amount of mandatory ID when accessing the Internet would stop it.
Oh, and if you think being anonymous makes people nasty, you should stop by some Facebook or Nextdoor forum :)
Can you give an example of what happened in UK that points to this issue?
This is just outright wrong. Europe in general has gotten less and less violent over the last decade. Despite evils like the internet, smartphones, and tiktok. I'd argue it has become more difficult to rile up people than it was 40 years ago
You are free to 'argue', but you need to read about how the modern riots are being organized on a massive scale, so that you can correct your argument.
Petition to force everyone saying "you need to read about XYZ" to provide at least 2 sources where one can actually read about XYZ.
- If you can't provide any sources, it's safe to assume you don't actually know what you're talking about. - If you can, but choose not to, why? This simply weakens your argument. - When you say "you need to read about XYZ", you probably WANT people to read about this, right? So why not point them at least to Wikipedia?
how are modern riots being organized on a massive scale? I'm curious
Would love to see some statistics on that.
Yes no one can point out the obvious -- you get removed from here for that.
You must agree with OP, you must not mention... Certain facts as you will be removed. Chat control is amazing.
Thanks for controlling my chat!
I have two observations to make here.
1. It seems that most of the evil here is concentrated among the liberal right and liberal left. Both far right AfD types and the left are against this.
2. A lot of positions, when clarified, just want to keep the (bad) status quo of CC1.0, while opposing 2.0, which was the much more totalitarian one. This also includes the crucial shadow rapporteurs.
This is still not good, but unless I've understood something very wrongly here, this isn't the same as just pushing the worst version of chat control 2.0 through.
The global push to kill privacy makes me sad.
Feels like I grew up in a golden age and subsequent generations won't care because they never knew a different world
I grew up when everyone was saying "don't post your face, name or address on the internet" - and that's what I've done. There are a total of maybe 3-6 pictures of me on the internet and my real name isn't attached to most of my brainfarts online.
It's not that I hide it like a secret agent, I just don't shove my face and name next to every opinion I have.
But the younger generations... They grew up with Snapchat which means Snap Streaks, which again means posting your face with every message. Next was Facebook, real names everywhere. Then came "personal branding", again face and name plastered everywhere.
And now governments want to lock in the real name + face + identity combo for everyone with laws. Fuck that.
> There are a total of maybe 3-6 pictures of me on the internet
Incorrect, you are probably in the background of random photos on the internet, and by virtue of not having any profiles and social media sites can tag you and form a shadow profile around you.
I still remember conversations here on HN, around the time Facebook was launched. It was considered insanity that you would give up your privacy to a firm.
I remember how that what seemed absurdly risky, meant absolutely nothing to the average person, and the astronomic value Facebook began to accumulate.
I wonder if it wasn't social media that set up the death spiral of the internet. The walled gardens on content and then the ad revenue created incentives to increase engagement, while capturing the value which would have gone to the open internet.
In that light, it seems AI firms are going to complete what Social Media started. Sequestering the remaining value of information and content, and then earning rents on it.
I didn't see it that way. when Facebook started it was like an intimate club.
Classmates.com was charging money for reunion information and Facebook was free.
It was the IPO that really tipped the scales.
In that one day Zuck became a Billionaire with everybody else's information.
We were bamboozled. Subscription versus free but not really.
If only you knew how bad things really were.
We can't even enforce basic protections of human rights in the United States, privacy does not matter when there are rampant black operations being conducted which violates human dignity in every sense of the term.
The illusion of digital privacy was always, propaganda. There's a pretty good chance your organism is literally compromised.
>privacy does not matter when there are rampant black operations being conducted which violates human dignity in every sense of the term.
You have this completely backwards. The threat and existence of such operations is one of the fundamental reasons privacy does matter so much. Privacy is to be protected heavily not just for the now but for what could happen in the future, and it's self-reinforcing. A more privacy preserving society is a harder one to oppress.
I think I understand what you are saying, let me reply with an example in which I think 'privacy' is harmful.
Lets say military intelligence has multiple NATO hospitals compromised, and have assets in these hospitals which are being used for various black operations (including non-medical neurosurgery on literal children). In this scenario, maybe total societal surveillance, including radical transparency, would have been a nice thing to have in regards to bolstering national security?
Instead, we got HIPAA, and other medical privacy laws/standards, which are aiding literal mass atrocity to continue to proliferate.
OK, setting aside the possibility this is some sort of joke/sarcasm I can't quite get, and the absolute wtf of this "scenario" which doesn't exist and all the ways it cannot exist with nothing to with privacy, and taking it sorta seriously, your argument completely falls down here amongst other places:
>Lets say military intelligence has multiple NATO hospitals compromised, and have assets in these hospitals which are being used for various black operations (including non-medical neurosurgery on literal children). In this scenario, maybe total societal surveillance, including radical transparency, would have been a nice thing to have in regards to bolstering national security?
Why the heck would you think that the first job of a hostile military intelligence wouldn't be TO COMPROMISE THE TOTAL SOCIETAL SURVEILLANCE NETWORK!?!? There is a sort of really fundamental common failure to this kind of conspiracy thinking, wherein simultaneously your opponent is this incredibly powerful and skilled entity, one that in this case can compromise lots of secured aspects of society and insert actual agents into a hospital for illegal child surgery and escape notice. Yet simultaneously they're complete idiots who don't do the obvious, obvious job #1, job #2, and job #3 of an intelligence agency which is seek to compromise your enemy's intelligence agencies! Duh. It always has been. Counter intelligence and trying to get inside the other agency's decision loops has rich history probably for as long as spying has been done.
Why do you think you can secure this incredibly invasive theoretical network, all evidence from our entire history to the contrary, yet not medical service providers? You've literally built something here that your enemy would desperately love to have! You've done their entire job for them, better than they could! Rather then having to try to compromise endless distributed independently secured private and public organizations, now they just have to compromise a single one and they get the keys to the kingdom.
>Instead, we got HIPAA, and other medical privacy laws/standards, which are aiding literal mass atrocity to continue to proliferate.
This is such schizobabble that makes no sense (HIPAA has nothing to with law enforcement or medical ethics boards or a million other checks on the health system, just for starters) that I don't know what else to do beyond urging you to seek some alternatives to wherever you got this from.
It was always to be, as sure as the exponential meets the linear. I worry though, about all the unborn ideas, innovations and technologies, which could stabilize the current unstable situation, getting aborted by the surveilance which is introducedto "stabilize" things.
"The global push to kill privacy makes me sad."
This "push to kill privacy" if it exists has been carried out by so-called "tech" companies
European governments are not killing privacy. They cannot legally conduct the sort of mass surveillance done by so-called "tech" companies
If, through "Chat Control" legislation that targets these companies, governments effectively kill the commercial viablity of so-called "tech" companies in Silicon Valley performing intermediation with no legal limits on surveiillance,^1 including offering "chat services", then, in fact, these governments may be restoring privacy that has been lost to Silicon Valley surveillance, whether that is the governments' intention or not
1. If there were legal limits, if users' privacy from so-called "tech" companies was protected by law, then governments could not ask for access to other peoples' "private chats" because there would be no one to ask. Government would have to ask the chat partcipants for their own chats.^2 The Silicon Valley "business model" of unregulated intermediation and surveillance could not exist. It would be illegal
2. In that case, the chat participants could defend themselves. For example reasonable suspicion of illegal activity might be required as grounds to make such requests
No one should believe that Silicon Valley is trying to protect anyone's privacy. Nothing could be further from the truth. Those companies have systematically destroyed privacy for profit at unprecedented scale
Any legislation that targets these companies, such as "Chat Control", may actually improve privacy if it reduces the number of people using those company servers
"In almost every meeting, they would unleash a one-word imprecation to sum up any and all who stood in the way of their master plans.
"Bastards!" Larry would exclaim when a blogger raised concerns about user privacy."
From Douglas Edwards' book I'm Feeling Lucky: Confessions of Google Employee #59 (2011)
Similar books about what goes on inside Meta are actively being supressed
There was a time when the internet existed without these intermediaries
The internet existed before them and it will still exist after them
> The global push to kill privacy makes me sad.
Only sad? Like, we already lost and we might as well give up?
I’m not sad. I’m scared, and I’m angry. And I’m beginning to think maybe everyone should be too. I mean, in normal circumstances, you don’t want an angry and scared population, that’s generally a recipe for disaster. At this point though, given the various decisions at the top that so clearly disfavour the bottom 99%, angry and scared is probably exactly what we need. Well, angry, mostly. Furious. Mad.
The hard part is determining who the enemy actually is. Hint: the more wealth and power, the more likely this is one of them. Strip them of their ungodly wealth and influence, you may get a human being back.
It's not just killing privacy though. Democracy is undermined here by big money.
What 'big money' you have in mind in this very specific case?
Closely related, I think. Without privacy even demonstrating, a democratic right, becomes risky.
We are living in a strange mixture of 1984, Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World
>Fahrenheit 451
We are quite far away from that. On the contrary knowledge is preserved better than ever.
Anna's Archive estimates they have preserved 16% of the world's books, all available to download with an internet connection.
https://annas-archive.gl/faq
On the other hand, I can see the side of Fahrenheit 451 where the people don't value books which is what allowed the book burning in the first place.
Like you said in the second part: people don't want to know anymore and just want to watch "game shows". No one is forbidding anything like in the other books. Doom scrolling is peak Fahrenheit.
If you need to point to Anna's Archive for knowledge preservation, then we as a society are not intentionally preserving knowledge, quite the opposite actually.
annas archive is a single point of failure
Maybe a hot take, but I don't know that "privacy" and "anonymity" are the same thing, or that the latter is worth preserving. I would very much like to live in a world where everyone stood by everything they said online with their real identity, just as they already do in the real world.
This was already the case for all of human history until the information age. If you wanted to say something, you had to physically say/print/shout it. And your reputation would be affected as a consequence. This more aligned with how humans are wired - that social actions have social consequences.
If every potential mate and employer was able to review everything you've ever posted online, we'd all be much more careful with what we say, much better able to screen out bad actors, and the wold would be a better place for it.
That works better in a less-connected, more local-bubble-centric world. Back then unless you were expressing something really inflammatory or contrary to a narrow slice of government-opposed ideology (e.g. red scare in the US), you could be spread your opinion mostly freely without too much fear of blowback.
In the modern world, we have governments (and politically aligned lackey-citizens) increasingly actively hunting down anything vaguely dissent-shaped and making those who spoke it suffer in some form, whether than be mass harassment and jawboning or outright muzzling or prosecution.
There’s a chilling effect with growing intensity that pressures people to either obediently nod along or shut up, which makes anonymity (even if only the plausibly deniable sort) important.
Do you ever wonder why we vote anonymously?
Voting and broadcasting (and here we are broadcasting) are different things.
I'm not sure I agree, people say unhinged things on TikTok/Facebook using accounts that have their full government name and/or showing face. I doubt deanonymisation would help.
To me "people will be on their best behaviour if they can't be anonymous" sounds eerily similar to Larry Ellison's "people will be on their best behaviour if they're constantly surveilled".
Your world sure makes impersonation based cyber crime a lot simpler.
>everyone stood by everything they said online with their real identity
And get Charlie Kirk'ed? No thanks. There are a lot of deranged and demented people out there, and publishing on the internet is rolling that dice billions of times, compared to shouting in the town square.
> If every potential mate and employer was able to review everything you've ever posted online, we'd all be much more careful with what we say, much better able to screen out bad actors, and the wold would be a better place for it.
This is stalking and is illegal. Are there any other crimes you want to claim as righteous?
Presuming you want stalking to be repealed and permissible, you have quite a few bars to pass through.
And in that society, are you willing to have me as your enemy who is very willing to push society to its utter limits? I know I'd be good at it, and I know thousands if not millions of people who share this interest. Because, as you say, its any potential mate/employer.
> This is stalking and is illegal. Are there any other crimes you want to claim as righteous?
What is legal and what is right very rarely went together, so rather poor argument.
alright, but the important query is: this isn't happening in a vacuum, there's a lot of various forces.
Lets say the primary force we need to prevent is russian influence campaigns that back and push far right nationalists who will destabilize democracy. Is that a sufficient reason for controls?
It's always curious what people think about the actual content that's typically pushing these things.
>Lets say the primary force we need to prevent is russian influence campaigns that back and push far right nationalists who will destabilize democracy. Is that a sufficient reason for controls?
No. Because if you solve underlying tensions in society the so called russian propaganda has nothing to take hold on.
Also who and under what rules will decide which propaganda is allowed? is American propaganda fine? Chinese? Japanese? UAE?
Not only this creates dissident, and suppresses voices critical of current government. but also gives extraordinary power on level of soviet union to current government.
You might trust current EU to not abuse it, but it might take a single elections, or single term for un-elected(!) officials in EC for attidute to change.
Just like in US - a lot of powers were granted but suddenly there's a person willing to abuse them.
For that to be even considered in EU we would need a lot more check and balances - especially for European Comission and Council.
Another issue is - is EU a trade union or federation? if former - this is outside of EU's responsiblities and powers. if later - look at point above.
If you really wanted to solve this problem you would go after advertisers and data collection companies, and regulate them.
The answer to lies is generally sunshine, not censorship. There are just too many examples of censorship eventually being misused by those in power. The power to censor Russia right now might appear appealing to those in charge, but they need to remember, pro-Russian factions may be voted into power in the future, and they will use this power to suppress information they don't like. Once the precedent is created, it's too late to cry about censorship when it's your "side" which gets censored. No one will care.
To point: I don't accept the premise that the governments gets to decide which information I should be allowed to consume.
Is it a sufficient reason to build a cage for yourself that only needs a single regime flip to turn against you? Is it a sufficient reason to become what you're trying to avoid? Is destabilizing democracy necessary to stop the democracy from being destabilized? No, no, and no.
>russian influence campaigns
Just FYI, your rhetoric precisely mirrors Russian internal rhetoric used to boil the frog 10-15 years ago. If this doesn't make you pause and think, nothing will. In Russia people who fall for it are called "unteachable". Which makes sense, you don't seem to learn anything from their mistakes even though you have a live example of your future that you will reach with 99% certainty, without any help from your boogeymen, because your politicians mirror each step.
>who will destabilize democracy
Let's just ban those politicians, ban and censor "bad" media and platforms, and surveil all citizens to protect us from those pesky authoritarians!
Is eroding privacy the only way to combat that?
> Is that a sufficient reason for controls?
no.
Rubbish. Fighting fascism by implementing totalitarian tools is a ludicrous idea.
Start with dismantling the means by which the information cancer spreads. No more targeted ads, no more data harvesting. Increase privacy.
Everybody knows about the influence of Russian bots on the net and yet precisely fuck all is being done about it.
And how do you do that? Either you have some government agency able to quickly decide what is a "Russian bot" and censor it or you have a public deliberation process where evidence is required to be presented before censoring the Russian bot. The former is guaranteed to be abused to censor things that the government doesn't like and the latter is too slow to be of any effect.
I don’t think that bot mitigation is nearly the ordeal that the social media giants pose it to be, so long as the desired result is keeping such activity minimized (practical) and not entirely eliminated (impossible), especially in this era of increasingly capable lightweight language models.
Taking Xitter as an example, there are many tells that are visible even to readers with limited info that should be as plain as day to the platform owner. Many are barely even masked. The problem is that for ad supported social media, all incentives align with proliferation of bots, especially if they’re paying you to boost their reach. They’re doing all the hard work of genetically engineering perfectly engaging content for you; who cares about the deleterious effects they’re having on society?
This is why surveillance style adtech must be made into a massive political liability.
Start by dismantling the mechanisms behind surveillance advertising.
You ... Work on aspects of your society that Russian bots can seize on?
Fracture point propaganda campaigns only work because we let those issues fester.
Why would Russia be responsible for what corrupt EU officials do?
There is a high chance that corrupt money spreads, which explains 100% of why such laws get in, but I fail to see why Russia should the only or primary actor be here. There is no real benefit for Russia here, but there is a LOT of benefit for those who want to reduce privacy and force transparency onto everyone at all times. Several US companies come to mind and there is cross-state kick back going on here even aside from the USA too.
You know EU has mostly gone after and unpersoned leftoids (and accusing them of working for russia), despite the rightoid wringing of hands?
Look up e. g. Hüseyin Doğru.
https://data.europa.eu/apps/eusanctionstracker/subjects/1756...
to argue that the success of the far right nationalists is solely off the back of Russian disinformation campaigns ignores the material reality experienced by far right party voters
Are you suggesting that the right (excuse me, FAR right) have valid and meaningful criticisms of the current state of their nations? Sounds like russian bot speak to me. Please report for mandatory re-education.
seems like a lot of people either know way to much about the paradox of tolerance and how to wield it against people's best interest; or know nothing about it.
I am getting somewhat confused about this. That website seems to be equating (semi-?)-reasonable measures with monstrosities such as banning or effectively banning e2ee.
Welcome to discussions on privacy on the internet :)
I think the EU politicians who continue to push this agenda should be investigated as to where the lobbying money is coming from.
Looking across the Atlantic…
Yes everything stupid that the EU does to themselves is because of big bad USA...
They are perfectly capable of doing idiotic stuff like this entirely on their own.
This is going to further increase anti-EU sentiment. This is unacceptable behaviour, but no politician is ever going to experience any negative consequences over this because they're so very far removed from the democratic process.
Most of the time, when "the EU" is doing something bad, it's actually the national governments wearing a different hat. The Parliament is pretty reasonable on the average, while the national policicians in the Council take advantage of the ignorance of the public. They can pursue their favorite policies without consequences, as the EU gets all the blame.
Doesn't matter because Apple will happily implement messages scanning immediately and eagerly. And despite let's say Poland not implementing the bill, all iPhones in Poland will snitch on their owners. Tim Cook's Apple is not Steve Jobs' Apple.
Case in point: my new Mac purchased in Switzerland and activated in Poland on my US Apple account required me to provide my age in the setup assistant. Neither Poland nor Switzerland or the US have this stupid law. Yet Apple is already doing it's part to eliminate my privacy.
And you think Google or Samsung will fight tooth and nail against EU not to implement it?
No, absolutely not. From those two I expect even more overcompliance.
Could you clarify what you mean by „required me to provide my age in the setup assistant“? Was is actually required, or optional? Dont they already have your age associated with your iCloud account, or were you creating a new one? Without more details I’m pretty skeptical there is something nefarious here
It was a required step in the setup assistant.
I was trying to setup this Mac with NO iCloud account thus it could not deduct my age from the account.
which speaks volumes about either EU overstepping it's bounds as an entity, or is severely lacking checks and balances.
I don't think you can nicely divide it like that.
It seems to be mostly bad individuals, or just individuals with some bad ideas they refuse to give up.
Plus the lobby groups that are behind and provide most of the proposal drafting
the problem is that EU has no way for citizens/voters to actually purge those bad individuals.
The issue is that the outcome is the same: whether the Parliament is made up of angels or not, the dealings of the Commission and Council affect the Member States anyway.
The Council is the member states.
The Commission are their appointed civil service and work on whatever agenda is set by the Council (the member states).
Almost everything people complain about coming out of "the EU" originates in the national elected governments.
About the only ones actually protecting the people of the MEPs (the elected EU MPs). They keep shutting this sort of stuff down, and then some member state (mostly Denmark it seems) finds a way to resurrect it again, and again, and again. They only need to succeed once.
I don't disagree with this: I'm saying that unless the power is of the Council and Commission is restrained, all the goodwill of the Parliament is an uphill battle and all people of the Member States are subjected to the corruption of unelected people like Ursula von der Leyden or of (temporarily?) problematic policies of some of the Member States' governments (like Denmark on Chat Control).
True, this seems to be Denmarks project
As an extension of this, look at the European Commission's response to the Stop Destroying Videogames[0] petition. It's utter dogshit. The petition is a pure consumer protection issue and the Commission's response is "but we can't touch IP rights". Bullshit, you guys made IP rights, you wrote all the rules surrounding them, and Donald Trump is about to drown you with them because America's tech oligarchs figured out your rulebook better than you knew it.
Or, if you think that issue's too niche, look at all the talk of "sovereign clouds". It's almost all "how can we build our own giant polluting AI datacenters" and not "how do we take our data back from the Americans". Because, ultimately, the European Commission is built out of an urge to submit to capital interests. The Epstein class are puppeting the EC in exactly the same way they puppet Donald Trump.
If there is any future in the EU, it will start with abolishing the European Commission to take away the capital class's accountability sink.
[0] For legal reasons, unrelated to Stop Killing Games, but they work together
Abolishing the European Commission would be seen as an attack on the individual countries' sovereignty as it would give more power to the EU.
Well of course it's about building data centers. There are exactly 3 options for you:
1. use "giant polluting AI data centers" in the US or China
2. build "giant polluting AI data centers" in the EU
3. do without modern technology
Option 1 fails at "how do we take our data back from the Americans" and option 3 is insanity and will fail at the ballot box. So get ready for option 2.
> 1. use "giant polluting AI data centers" in the US or China > > 2. build "giant polluting AI data centers" in the EU > > 3. do without modern technology
I think we need to start brainstorming on options 4 and 5.
Option 2 doesn't make any sense. Europe do not have any strategic advantage here, not the cheap energy, it actually doesn't have the money and it doesn't really have any strong enough capabilities in the hardware or software (yes I know about somes like ASML and open source software). Plus the price of RAM is out of control now.
Usually when you are at a strategic disadvantage you need to start thinking out of the box, or bet on the next thing. AI and "The Cloud" are not gonna be the last technology frontiers, in many ways it might be yesterday bet. It is like buying a stock close to the peak of a bubble.
The Taiwanese did not try to compete Toyota in the 80s, they created TSMC.
Of course do not expect the EU bureaucrats to do be able to do any out of the box thinking.
Also, don't forget the foreign propagandists who absolutely hate democracy, and have toppled both Britain and America.
That seems to always be "forgotten" about how the internet is acting as a accelerationist far right platform.
The EU has a lot of upsides, and it's often been a reason to be optimistic about it as a project, but everyobe has a red line beyond which the upsides don't outweigh the downsides, where the slope becomes too slippery to ignore.
If Chat Control passes, I think lobbying for the exit of your country is going to become a very justifiable position.
Corbyn was famously a Leaver, for the reasons we're observing right now, before aligning his position with his base: a Labour Left UK without the antidemocratic corruption of the EU would arguably have been a better country to live in.
Still, this is mostly pushed by particular countries (e.g. Denmark), the commission and aggressively pursued by lobbyist. The most democratic body in the EU (the EP) has so far always rejected Chat Control.
Without the EU, this would have been introduced in some member countries much earlier (see also UK).
Let it not be forgotten that when Denmark was president of the Council of EU and tried to push this forward, one of the former colleagues/friends of the justice minister was charged with child abuse in 2025. Just search Henrik Sass Larssen and Peter Humeelgaard.
We should start digging into the lives of those pushing for mandated age verification, chat control, and other privacy killing measures to show the world their true face. The public deserves to know who exactly is pushing for the "privacy law for kids" agenda.
Yes, EP has rejected it, and now the president of the EP is ignoring that outcome.
I can speak for the sentiment in Denmark: most people are unaware of this legislation. A vocal minority of us (who are a little too online) have been trying to educate people, but I think it feels too esoteric. We had a poll last year which asked, "the ability to detect child abuse is more important than the right to online privacy." 65% of people said yes, 33% said both are equally important, and only 2% said online privacy is more important. The discussion for normal people is often couched in the language of "think of the children." Unfortunately, that appears to be highly effective with the Danes.
To be honest, I'm beginning to suspect most people don't care all that much about privacy if you promise them safety.
It only has to pass once, and we have to scream about it every goddamn time try try. And they'll try and try again and again.
>Without the EU, this would have been introduced in some member countries much earlier (see also UK).
And without the EU there'd be some states in which it would never be introduced. Decentralization is what made Europe so successful historically compared to large centralized empires like China and the Ottomans, and the EU is destroying that.
What you call decentralization and „so successful“ resulted in constant wars and conflicts. Europe would be in a way worse place right now without some form of union like the EU
Those constant wars and conflicts were what pushed European countries to develop the military technologies that allowed them to conquer most of the world.
Are you defending colonization, or am I misunderstanding you? When you say conquer, I think you mean invade, genocide, enslave, subject most of the world. We also killed each others for the most petty reasons ever instead of working towards a common goal
Agree. A while ago I met many normies who just complied. Now there is so much legislation that even the normies are starting to ask what is going on. But I guess that of exactly why they now need chat control! To get the herd back to work...
[flagged]
Marie Antoinette didn't have mass surveillance. This is why they're trying to rectify the situation.
I do not think any amount of surveillance can stop a motivated-enough massive-enough group of citizens interested in having more power over what happens to them. But it will get bloody.
> This is going to further increase anti-EU sentiment.
Rightfully so.
Except for no-roaming-charges within EU, most people can't name one good regulation that came from EU and couldn't be handled individually by their own country in the last few decades. The latest example is 3eur customs tax per every item bought from china, even if it's a 1eur phone case (1eur + 3eur customs + 22% vat on both.... what's the added value of custom tax? who knows, but you pay it anyway). Add all the money wasting, horrible behaviour of politicians in charge, overpaid MEPs for what they do... it's no wonder people hate everything EU related.
All sticks, no carrots.
There's the lack of customs charges for items from other European countries. The common market is a really big advantage. There's the Euro, and in the past, the EU did a fairly decent job at holding large corporations accountable, although that seems to have disappeared with Neelie Kroes' retirement.
And of course the lack of borders. Being able to go on vacation with no trouble is massive. Do we really want those border checks back?
You didn’t need the EU for the removal of trade barriers and the common market. Both were established quite a while before the EU as we know it now became a thing in the 90s.
> we really want those border checks back
Why? You don’t need to be in the EU to belong to Shengen.
The European Union is actually an union of treaties, with countries that sign some and not others. So here you would need to be more specific.
That used to be the case. i.e. if imposing Chat Control on all countries would have required a treaty it would hardly have any chances. However national governments have delegated the right to EU institutions to impose mandatory regulations. You can’t pick and chose anymore.
Not really.
Norway is not EU, it's EEA, which is more like what you describe (the population rejected joining twice in referendums, but the politicians still wanted some treaties).
Why one couldn't have all these without the EU ?
To hold large corps accountable you need clout, and the individual countries don't have that.
> Being able to go on vacation with no trouble is massive.
You are unironically using 'vacation destinations' as argument for modifying your legal system to fit foreign lobbying needs. All is lost.
The custom thing started from basically the beginning of eu, this wasn't done in the last decades, but the customs chargers for outside stuff have been increased by the EU. The large corporations are not reall accountable, Volkswagen screwed up, americans got buyback programms, hyundai/kia screwed up, americans got gas cards... intel scews up (spectre, no hyperthreading to keep safe), europeans get nothing. And yes, there are border checks within EU, just had to show my ID yesterday on the slovenia-austria border.
Tell me you don't see the value in the tax as a way of discouraging people from ordering a pair of socks from the other side of the globe, while they can buy them locally?
Why let a middleman rentseek?
It’s not a “middleman rent seeking”, it’s protectionism. If lower cost production is available elsewhere in the world, there are three options.
1. Stop producing locally. Allow the market to take care of it.
2. Deregulate minimum wages to allow local businesses to price locally produced goods competitively.
3. Impose a tariff on incoming goods to protect local producers.
Which is your preference?
Market has already did the thing. In this case it's protecting local retailers who import in bulk over consumers importing individually.
For phone cases, maybe, but not for everything under 150 EUR…
On top of that, local retailers have to comply with EU regulations etc. while Chinese imports are notorious for not following safety/recycling standards etc., which unbalances the playing field away from local retailers anyway.
Where is the rentseeking in that example? Rentseeking is the expenditure of resources to influence the rules so you can charge rent. The sock merchant in the example isn’t.
There are two levels of rentseeking in any tariff example.
The first level is the intended rentseeking: we make imported socks from China more expensive so you buy domestically made socks instead. There are various excusable reasons why you would want to do this, but at the end of the day, we are still assigning the class of people who make socks domestically the ability to charge a supra-competitive price, which is a rent.
The second level is unintended rentseeking. Maybe it turns out the economy really, really doesn't want to fund a domestic sock industry. Maybe our sockmakers are just really, really bad at making socks. Or maybe people really, really want foreign socks. In any of these cases, the people just pay the tariff no matter the cost.
For example, Brazil has had extraordinarily high import tariffs on all sorts of consumer electronics. The intent is to create a domestic electronics industry. The reality is, however, Brazil was never going to be able to support that. Electronics are a highly exportable industry and the global market can only support a few countries being involved in it. So the result is that game consoles and smartphones are just really expensive purely for the benefit of people involved in the tax scheme.
This is global trade and comparative advantage at work. If someone outside the country can produce an equivalent product to what a local producer would make, they can supply it to our market more efficiently than our local producers, and there are no moral qualms (for example people working under conditions that are unacceptable by our standards) then everyone benefits from the import arrangement except for the local producers who can't compete.
From an economic perspective the local producer then needs to become more efficient and/or produce a better product to remain competitive. Alternatively they can do something else that is a more productive use of their time and skills. Again this is just a free market at work. The economic principle is no different if another local producer opened down the road from the existing local producer and they were the ones making the same product cheaper or a better product for the same price.
Protectionism arguably has a place. For vital interests like national defence there is an argument for making certain things locally so you have complete control because of the security implications and because the normal rules of international trade and diplomacy might not be working properly at the time when you need those products. But even in fields like defence and strategic infrastructure and perhaps the most obvious example of simply putting enough food on everyone's plate to survive there are few if any Western nations that don't rely significantly on international trade.
There is an example I always remember from the Brexit debates here in the UK. The Remain campaigners talked a lot about the advantages of being in the EU's Single Market and Customs Union. (These are the two big economic arrangements in the EU that allow member states to trade freely among themselves without tariffs or non-tariff barriers.) And certainly for intra-EU trade they do offer many economic advantages.
However the cost of being under the protectionist umbrella was much less discussed - surprisingly even by Leave campaigners. All member states are required to apply the common EU-based tariffs to anything coming into their country from outside the union. So when the EU introduced extremely high tariffs to protect the fruit growers in its Mediterranean member states that was good for those growers. But we don't exactly grow a lot of citrus fruit in the UK with our milder northern European climate. We also already had some established trade routes with north African nations that could supply similar products at potentially lower cost and would have liked to increase that trade with us - a mutual benefit for both their suppliers and our consumers that would have cost neither of us anything directly. The EU tariffs made that financially unviable and therefore benefitted some of the southern member states but at the expense of both consumers in the UK (also an EU member state at the time!) and the more efficient suppliers from Africa.
Protectionism is inherently inefficient economically. Sometimes it might be appropriate for other reasons but in purely financial terms it's almost always a negative effect.
Because we don't make those socks locally. They come from the other side of the globe.
For example, i want to buy a phone case... i can order one on aliexpress for ~1eur (free shipping) + 3eur tax + 88cents of vat and pay 4.88for it.
Or I can go to my local mall, and buy the identical case, made by the same chinese manufacturer for 12-15eur. The middleman can order 100 of those cases and since they're the same TARIC code, he'll still just pay 3eur (total) in customs for all of them (3% customs, instead of 300% if you order 1 piece only) and still be much more expensive than if I order directly from china.
So instead of paying 1eur + having 4 eur left over to go for a beer, i now pay almost 5eur, no local beer and 75% of that tax doesn't even go to my country but directly into EU budget. I can afford less and won't get anything out of that money. Yes, there's an employee in that cell phone store, but so is there an employee in my local bar where I can't afford beer anymore because EU took my money.
What have the Romans ever done for us?
> even if it's a 1eur phone case (1eur + 3eur customs +
That's the fucking point for fuck's sake! Pardon my language, but the entire point of the tariff is to stop people from buying masses of trivial things from the other side of the world, with all the externalities that it entails. This tariff tries to cover at least some fraction of said externalities.
People on HN should not be this clueless about basic economy. This tariff is one of the good things that the EU has done lately, but unfortunately it won't be popular among the common folk who just want their cheap unsustainable stuff without having to think about the consequences.
This is obviously not the point if the surcharge disappears on packages with total price over 150 €.
When Trump introduced tariffs everyone screamed but now the EU does EXACTLY the same and suddenly it's okay.
> That's the fucking point for fuck's sake! Pardon my language, but the entire point of the tariff is to stop people from buying masses of trivial things from the other side of the world, with all the externalities that it entails. This tariff tries to cover at least some fraction of said externalities.
Boy, when you put it that way it makes me wonder why people didn't appreciate the genius of Trump's tarrifs.
Are you kidding me..? The freedom of movement across all member states, including the right to settle and start a business anywhere you like, that's not a "good regulation" to you? Being able to pay in all of those states without paying FX rates, bringing home your purchases across the border without tolls or even checkpoints no less? The funding of a massive amount of public benefit projects in poorer member states, including art and artists, public health and education, infrastructure - all of that isn't worth anything? The ability to trust everything you buy to be safe, from child toys to food to cars? This list goes on for a long time.
Many politicians have used the EU as a convenient scapegoat for inconvenient decisions, and people like you continue to spread completely uninformed FUD.
Let's even put aside all the benefits you have but apparently either don't know or don't care about. How well do you think your home country would fare against the USA or China or Russia on its own? The only weapon all of us have against the big power blocks of the world is being a power block on our own.
The EU isn't perfect, and I'm absolutely opposed to the Chat Control bullshit in its entirety, but don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
I think he is saying all those beneficial things could be done by multilateral agreements without the need for the additional layer of EU organization and bureaucracy. In fact some of them already have been done that way.
If you wanted to come up with individual multilateral agreements to cover even a fraction of what the EU does for its member states, you'd reinvent it in one form or another.
I don't mean this personally, but it appears as though many commenters here have absolutely no clue of how the EU works, what its governing bodies do, and how member states profit off of that.
>The freedom of movement across all member states, including the right to settle and start a business anywhere you like, that's not a "good regulation" to you
That's not regulation, that's a reduction in regulation.
That’s a reduction in prohibitions, not regulation. You cannot enable this without regulating how it works.
Might make sense to message the MEP's that oppose chat control moreso the ones that support it. Maybe they can use some of their internal influence to sway some people. I'm pessimistic about the amount of weight these representatives are giving to emails from citizens
Chat control is about controlling peoples life's and minds. The really scary part is how many actually wants this and mindlessly buy into the narrative the EU put forth about why it is needed.
Also worth noting is that this was voted down earlier this year and if im not mistaken also a couple of years ago. But the legislators then just started a new slightly different bill and started nodging their population even harder, and tried again. And again.
The people said no to this.. But apparently that does not matter?! Is this still a democracy?
And are we criticizing totalitarian regimes for surveiling their people and not allowing free speech... And doing this to our own population? It seems so Bizar to me.
Personally I don't know what to do. I have come to the conclusion that fighting again this is impossible because, in my opinion, no one listens even after a democratic vote as I said already... I'm disgusted by what we have become...
RIP all of the open source European software initiatives.
This is so wrong, but here’s another reason: a centralized totalitarian approach could look like a very pragmatic way to exercise control and governance on the population. This is true though only if your technical capabilities are at a similar or higher level of your competitors.
In the European case we have neither the technology advancement of the US, or the supply chain control of China.
This means that a centralized approach is only going to create a larger vulnerability surface for an external attacker.
A decentralized, privacy and security first approach isn’t only right for moral/ethical reasons. It’s the only way we have to defend ourselves, even if we had a fascist government.
You could also view it from the perspective of that if every other major superpower has their mass surveillance and you don't, it becomes an assymetrical informational situation where foreign governments can influence your citizens, but you cannot influence the foreign citizens since they are surveilled and their informational diet is restricted.
In some sense Chat Control is a geopolitical necessity for the EU, there is no choice to not do it.
What's to point of all this? Everyone will use Signal or some other E2E encrypted messenger, this is just bone tossing. Useless politicans spending time on useless things.
Chat control takes screenshots of your phone. E2EE is useless. It's government mandated spyware.
They are talking about mandatory on-device scanning. E2E doesn't solve this.
So the EU will just tell Apple and Google to remove Signal from their app stores and 95-99% of the population won’t bother figuring out it exists..
And as always, the only people who will bother will be the few% who are involved in some sort of illegal activity.
Maybe the EU can work together with Russia on the Max messenger
In every authoritarian regime people spent considerable amount of time on workarounds. Underground press, parallel education etc. this is just another iteration of Stasi like regime, just with a nicer suit and better PR.
In reality this should have been rejected wholesale and people proposing this barred from any public sector jobs, or even arrested for terrorist attack attempt (Chat Control fulfils definition of terrorism).
China, Russia, and friends will provide digital escape hatches for Western cititizens and vice versa it seems
There is nothing redeemable about this union anymore.
So are they going to ban encrypted email? I am rather sure i could cobble together a chat UI whose backend was just email protocol. It would be needlessly complex, but all that ISPs would see is yet more encrypted email going back and forth.
https://delta.chat/en/
The recent times showed us that technical solutions are bananas.
Guardrails must be put at the constitution level, or any tech bypass can be just declared illegal.
They’ll just criminalise private encryption for communication afterwards.
Yeah I agree they will put people to prison for trying to get around chat control
Delta Chat does that but it's a bit janky.
We see here how lobbyists undermine democracies.
Amazing how the EU commission does so unashamedly. It's basically the copy/paste system of the USA here. Big money wants laws. They have no shame in buying these laws.
Related:
European Commission's Metsola Overrides MEPs to Force Through Chat Control
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48657675
why have we not heard more of a pushback from business and legal entities regarding privileged communication / protection of trade secrets?
They just can't let it go.
Is it democracy if they keep pushing agendas even if they are voted down?
It's an open secret the european union has nothing to do with the will of the people
Yes the EU was setup as an organization more like the IMF or the World Bank. Its mandate creeped out over decades and now we are waking up to the authoritarian monster it became.
They setup a fake parliament which is indeed elected through universal suffrage but is only here to adopt legislations proposed by the Commission. Since citizen do not elect the Comission this has nothing to do with a democracy.
Here on HN, people fully understand how bad and unfit Chat Control is. But keep in mind the EU has been passing legislations like this for decades and in every domains.
For every good one (like mandating USB-C) you get 9 bad ones.
plenty of people desire something like this, and 'saving the children' is their genuine intent and desire. Humanity is willing to shoot itself in the foot again and again, there's no need for it to be some shadowy cabal.
Plenty of people do want more surveillance, but that's not why EU politicians are doing this. Seeking to implement surveillance across an entire continent cannot be explained by "the will of the people". Danes might want surveillance for their children, but I can't imagine them lobbying their EU representatives to also protect the children in France as well.
This is bullshit. The EU parliament is the organ that shot it down so far.
Read the article. It is the national governments pushing this shit. They try to launder if through the EU because passing those legislations locally would likely be very unpopular.
In cybernetics, there is a saying that;
"The purpose of a system is what it does".
By observation, the purpose governments is to run scams. After all, it makes no sense to attribute their purpose to things they consistently fail to do.
Relevant music vide featuring Stafford Beer, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqBBNjkAlXM
I think the EU thinks that opposition to the EU must be from foreign actors. This is why citizens has to be surveiled so that the EU can catch the foreign actors or some goofy crap like that.
My point being that the opposition to the EU comes from EU citizens of the EU... Because the EU make stuff like chat control...
Or it could be we have fully crossed over into stasi territory already and they are having a great cozy party while they make life more and more unbearable for the population?!