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.
It doesn't have to be though. There is countless benefits to decentralized and federated platforms, even for your average Joe.
It's just that all the Google, Microsoft, and Meta platforms had shiny new features and we all switched. There is no real reason we can't go back, sure the network effect is hard to overcome but the technological problem is moderately simple to solve (we did it in the past!)
> As part of changing laws in Europe, Meta now offers the option for you to chat with others using third-party messaging apps that have integrated with WhatsApp and that you choose to turn on. - Whatsapp Help Center
Currently support is a bit shit, given it's relatively new. Give it 3-5 years and I'm sure this will look very different.
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.
> it's not like internet is made of a few select providers
In practice it is. Almost all messaging happens on a few apps.
> also the most widely available apps already comply to the single police request to access conversations from suspects
That is not true: Signal is widely available and doesn't do that. WhatsApp probably doesn't do it either.
Don't get me wrong: I am against ChatControl as well. I believe that security comes at the cost of freedom, and it is a choice to be made on a case-per-case basis. Removing E2EE for everybody is not worth it, because criminals will always be able to use encryption one way or another. The problem is that politicians don't seem to understand it.
> Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.
Like, you can get 30 years in prison now for moving some boxes with zines in them, just because you are anti-fascist.
Yes, this is American politics; but don't think that the benevolent overloads of the EU don't plan for this same outcome: Already in many European countries, I can go to prison for just saying, "Free Palestine". They want it so that people cannot even say that in private.
Listen I agree, but the solution to this problem is not social media mediated pseudo-anonymity the operators know who you are and they are working with them.
The solution is keeping fascists of the levers of power which America has done an incredibly bad job at for the last 10 years.
If you really want to have free speech, you need to be in your own domain and that is going to be increasingly dangerous as you have noted too. So you know I see antifa tor services run out of servers in Europe in your future.
I totally agree, the problem is difficult however because even if we create a perfectly anonymous system for registering with social media, modern LLMs make semantic analysis trivial. It's going to be impossible to remain anonymous without also using an LLM to strip the unique footprint of your text. Which leads to a very strange and monotonous culture for internet discussions. Might be unavoidable, though, at least for certain kinds of discussions.
Yes this is indeed a problem. But this is even more reason to keep private conversations private. It will stop those LLMs learning your footprint from your private conversations.
It's an interesting thing what you're saying. I've been thinking about this happening (I think it's inevitable) and also about using an LLM to sanitise my semantic footprint.
Yeah, it's been on my mind since the original transformers paper, because persona and identity management has been a long-time interest of mine. Both offensive and defensive tooling, such as fingerprinting and anti-fingerprinting.
If you're interested in building an open source persona management suite to distribute as freedom software and level the playing field against State agents who are already building and improving such tools, I would love to find a partner to help with such a project. Even if you don't code, there are other duties besides coding involved with successfully promoting such a project and developing a community around it.
Yes I work in cyber and I've always thought about the ability for fingerprinting people by their content. Not really semantically (that was just not really possible until LLMs came up) but more in terms of interests on social media.
But semantic analysis adds a whole new level with so much entropy that it's bound to be unique. And LLMs are just ideal for pattern recognition. There's not much we can do about that as a human, trying to fool it won't work. It really needs an artificial sanitiser. One that really builds a persona and aligns to it deeply (like little colloquialisms from the purported origin of the persona).
And also things like comment posting hours. I have identified several accounts from people who said they were chatting with me and I could prove they were doing something completely different at that same time. Us humans aren't consistent enough for that. Especially if you have multiple sockpuppets.
I don't think I could help much with that though. I'm neither a developer nor a promotor, I'm too much of an introvert for that. But it sounds really interesting.
But yeah I'm sure that within 5 years, if you are still writing comments yourself, it won't matter whether they know your phone number or email address, you will be uniquely identified by just what you write. I wouldn't be surprised if the darker forces in society have this capability already.
There was a thread not too long ago where someone did stylometric analysis on HN, and quite a few users had true positive matches (though there were plenty false positives).
They later pulled the dataset, but antirez recreated it.
> but your account is too young to be in the dataset.
This is on purpose yes. I've taken to rotating my accounts everywhere on a semi-regular basis as a feeble low-effort mitigation that I'm sure will not hold once this gets into full blown deployment.
I know the HN community frowns on that but it's not like I rotate every day. Probably should for it to be effective though.
Thanks for the link I will try that out! I missed that happening.
WhatsApp already does it for unencrypted messages for about half of the EU under the purview of the rules of lawful interception obligations for NI-ICS, as well as Norway, Switzerland and the UK.
When they want to read encrypted messages they seize the phone and use Cellebrite or similar 3rd Party tooling to gain physical user-level access. No need for cert-pinning or esoteric MITM attacks.
N.B. China does not allow WeChat to have e2e encryption.
The whole point of end to end encryption is that providers cannot comply with police request to access conversations. A properly secured system would make it impossible without compromise of your device. Now i don't know what signal does, but I am almost certain WhatsApp can just lie about your contacts keys and man in the middle the connection.
That makes me question how much you know about end-to-end encrypted messengers, because Signal is the gold standard.
> I am almost certain WhatsApp can just lie about your contacts keys and man in the middle the connection.
The problem there is that WhatsApp is not open source, so you can't check. So obviously you have to trust. But there are many, many employees who have access to the WhatsApp sources, so if it was not implementing what it says it is, chances are that someone would have said it. Also thanks to the EU DMA we have some protocol published by WhatsApp.
> But there are many, many employees who have access to the WhatsApp sources, so if it was not implementing what it says it is, chances are that someone would have said it.
No one in Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL, Skype, or Apple said anything about PRISM. We had to wait for the NSA whistleblower. So the argument someone would say something does not really stand up to historical precedent.
I looked a bit into it and yeah they have a key transparency mechanism where they store a blockchain on s3.
So supposedly they can't just add a key for a user in secret. But still what if they do it in public does the client refuse to send messages to new keys?
It's not like we are all spending all our time going over a random s3 bucket to say `Aha, I am sure Bob didn't add this new key because he logged in from his desktop. It has to be a man in the middle`
Can they just siphon keys of your device? Can they just deploy a special version to just your device without the vast majority of engineers in meta even knowing about the compromised version? No one knows. Well no one in public.
The gold standard would be personally managed keys, exchanged and signed by your contacts in person, open source software that is not auto-updating, distributed over a channel that does not know your identity.
> It's not like we are all spending all our time going over a random s3 bucket to say `Aha, I am sure Bob didn't add this new key because he logged in from his desktop. It has to be a man in the middle`
That's not how key transparency works. The whole point of key transparency is that you don't have to do that.
If you are into manually checking that you have the right key, you can do it by scanning a QR code (or exchanging the key manually through some trusted channel), both on Signal and WhatsApp.
> Can they just siphon keys of your device?
Whoever hacks your device can read the messages, end-to-end encryption protects the data in transit, not at rest.
> Can they just deploy a special version to just your device
If you get WhatsApp through the Play Store, they would need to collude with Google to do that. But it is technically possible. If you get WhatsApp on the web it's a lot easier though: they can just serve you a different codebase this one time. BTW ProtonMail can do that too, or any webapp. Which I assume is why Signal doesn't have a web version.
> The gold standard would be personally managed keys, exchanged and signed by your contacts in person, open source software that is not auto-updating, distributed over a channel that does not know your identity.
You can get the sources of Signal, audit them yourself, compile them yourself, and verify the key with your contacts through a trusted channel (in person if you like). That is already possible.
> No one in Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL, Skype, or Apple said anything about PRISM
I think it is pretty different. Was PRISM available in the code source in the mono repo of all those companies? WhatsApp is.
This is an extremely naive view of politics in complex systems like the EU. We're not talking about the US of French president here. The people in the 27 EU countries elect their EU representatives, and nobody knows them. People usually vote for a party, and they usually don't care much about the EU, except for complaining.
It feels like people who are against the EU vote for far-right politicians (the ones that are against the EU).
EU politicians are elected by the people and they represent what the people from the 27 member countries voted. Which is different from e.g. the US president, where the people don't really have much choice. Same in France, where people voted against the far-right and not at all for Macron.
That is misleading, it's a eu parliament thing, it hinges on MEPs votes not countries. At the council level i.e intergovernmental, every one has veto powers, 4 would be enough to stop this for practically ever.
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.
EU law 101: (1) EU Commission (i.e. the executive) proposes a law; (2) EU Parliament signs off on it; (3) EU Council (i.e. the equivalent of a senate, comprising national governments) puts the final stamp on it.
The complicating factor being that a given law may or may not require unanimity at the final EU Council stage.
The Council of the European Union (what you probably mean by EU Council) isn't a senate. Its meetings are theoretically attended by ministers related to a specific topic area, so an agricultural law might be attended by agricultural ministers, but in practice that often doesn't happen and functionaries are rubber stamping laws without reading or debating them. Almost all the "votes" pass unanimously or with a single abstention / no vote.
One issue is that there are so many such laws that they are hardly ever reported in local media, so people just don't know about them and governments themselves don't try to inform anyone either. Then governments blame the EU once a law is already passed and tell citizens that it's now impossible to change because the EU Commission would refuse to propose a repeal or amendment.
It's often hypothesized that governments love this process because it lets them pass laws they know voters will hate without taking direct blame for it.
Yes, I fully understand the functioning, I was just trying to keep things simple. Even Europeans don't understand this, Americans must be lost. "Council of the EU" vs "EU Council" is next-level opacity. Since the latter doesn't technically exist, I find it helpful as a less syllabic synonym for the former (where it can sit neatly alongside EU Parliament and EU Commission, leaving nobody confused). That leaves the European Council, i.e. the periodic flagship permutation of the Council. This is indeed a senate-like entity in Montesquieuian terms, that wasn't my idea.
The EU council is not like the senate. It's the council of the executives of the member states i.e. the meeting of the governments of the states, summit meetings happen between prime ministers and presidents.
Chat control though will definitely not make it to a summit meeting, and almost definitely does not warrant unanimity, it's probably a simple majority issue, i.e not foreign relations, defense, etc.
The European Council, i.e. the highest instance of the regular Council, is indeed like a senate in plenary, with the routine Council meetings being comparable to committees. This is not an original idea. I was just trying to simplify things because otherwise it is all extremely opaque.
The EU is predicated on the pooled sovereignty of its constituent countries, as exercised thought the EU Council. Apart from a limited number of certain matters, any EU country can veto any decision made by the EU Commission, or indeed the EU Parliament.
This "keep asking until they say yes" strategy is by design and has been a common tactic used by the EU power centers in the past. See the way the Treaty of Lisbon was rejected in referendums, and then people were just made to vote again. Or the way the British pro-EU faction proclaimed in 2016 that Leave/Remain was a once in a generation vote to settle the issue for all time, then immediately started agitating for an aptly named People's Vote that would rerun the referendum again.
The EU is not a democratic system. It's specifically designed to undermine and eventually end the post-WW2 democracies through a mix of deception and bureaucratic manipulation. The never ending Chat Control story is a totally standard example. That's not a conspiracy theory either, there are lots of quotes from senior EU figures where they say all this stuff directly:
> If it's a 'Yes,' we will say "On we go!" and if it's a 'No' we will say "We continue!" (Junker, talking about the votes on the Lisbon Treaty)
> We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided we continue step by step until there is no turning back. (Junker again, on the general EU methodology)
> When people ask politicians today “What will become of Europe?” or “Where is European integration heading?”, we usually give an evasive answer. “We don’t want a super state” that is generally the first thing we say. I must admit that I have in the past often resorted to this kind of thing myself. (Viviane Reading, former vice president)
> We know that nine out of 10 people will not have read the Constitution and will vote on the basis of what politicians and journalists say. More than that, if the answer is No, the vote will probably have to be done again, because it absolutely has to be Yes. (Jean-Luc Dehaene, Former Belgian Prime Minister and Vice-President of the EU Convention)
> I have never understood why public opinion about European ideas should be taken into account. (Raymond Barre, former French Prime Minister)
There are endless quotes like these. You get a sense of the ideology found in the EU institutions by reading them. It's an ideology that never takes no for an answer, believes in its own manifest destiny and views the act of centralizing power as the central moral mission of their generation. So of course Chat Control is an unkillable zombie.
All the quotes are clearly talking about closer integration which no one is hiding is a stated goal of the European Union. It's right there in the original treaties `an ever closer union`. If you don't like it leave, but the rest have all committed to that a long time ago.
The chat control thing has nothing to do with all of the above, it's just a bit of legislation. The whole "we will vote on it again and again until we can finally push it through on the 12th of August at 03:00 o'clock with a total of 20 votes" is a typical strategy seen in many democracies pushed by vested interests on unpopular legislation.
It's not the "EU" that wants this to pass, there are specific people and groups pushing for this surveillance state apparatchiks, all sort of compliance industry vultures, and all the censorship technology industry that is dying to enter the chat market.
I really doubt von der Leyen or anyone in a position of actual power actually cares about this, I am certain they really think this is small time inconsequential bullshit. They have much larger problems to deal with, like the looming jet and diesel shortage, the upcoming crop shortfall we are going to see come harvest season, getting Mercosur through, planning for when Trump inevitably invades Cuba or puts Greenland back on the menu.
No, people didn't commit to it. That is pretty much the core of the criticism. It will never be a federation and while economic integration is worthwhile, it should be reduced to very clear boundaries.
> I really doubt von der Leyen or anyone in a position of actual power actually cares about this, I am certain they really think this is small time inconsequential bullshit.
And yet it just keeps showing up over and over and over again, no matter how many times it's voted down. Someone with no actual power must really not care about this at all.
>All the quotes are clearly talking about closer integration
Are you saying "the ends justify the means" of this "closer integration"? With that logic, Hitler's end goal was also closer integration of Europe's countries once he conquered them all.
>If you don't like it leave
Impossible to leave now when you joined 20+ years ago, when the EU was something completely different, which now grew beyond what you signed up for, without fucking your economy. It's called a rug pull with a dead man's switch. Try to leave and we make sure we all blow up.
>They have much larger problems to deal with, like [...] planning for when Trump inevitably invades Cuba
Why is Cuba a bigger issue for Ursula than what's happening in the EU? LAst time I checked Cuba is on a different continent and an insignificant trading partner of the EU.
> Impossible to leave now when you joined 20+ years ago, when the EU was something completely different, which now grew beyond what you signed up for, without fucking your economy. It's called a rug pull with a dead man's switch. Try to leave and we make sure we all blow up.
The EU was always designed to be an "ever closer union". It's literally in the Treaty of Rome from 1957 (!). This is explicitly what was signed up for. It's going a bit slow, unfortunately, but it is the core point. There's no rug being pulled. This was always the goal. It is specifically what everyone signed on to.
>The EU was always designed to be an "ever closer union".
Wow, isn't it convenient that such a vague all-encompassing paper from the past that you never voted for, can be used a justification for anything being done to you today?
What are the boundaries for that "ever closer union"? At which point it it just close enough? Or is it open ended? Would you sign an open ended contract with the bank? That wouldn't be legal.
>It's literally in the Treaty of Rome from 1957 (!)
How many Europeans alive today voted for that in 1957? Were they aware when they signed it of what it would lead to or were they duped into signing something so vague and all-encompassing that will be used to do anything against them in the future?
>This is explicitly what was signed up for.
That's the problem, it's vague and not explicit at all.
> This was always the goal.
Really? In 1957 people back then already knew that in the future they would cede their national sovereignty to a unelected bureaucrat in Brussels who would make decisions against their nation's best interest?
>It is specifically what everyone signed on to.
Who exactly is that "everyone"? I never voted for this. Neither did my parents.
There's no boundaries to "ever closer union". That's what ever closer means, definitionally.
Nobody was duped into anything, countries exercised their sovereignty to come to an agreement.
The rest of your concerns is just how literally any legislation and treaty ever works. When did you sign on to your country's constitution? What about the treaty of Bern establishing the Universal Postal Union in 1874?
Ok, but you haven't told me what exactly the end goal of that "ever closer union" is. Aren't we already fully unified?
Nor have you disputed the vagueness of the "ever closer union" which is used to undemocratically bully countries in the union to do what unelected corrupt Brussels bureaucrats want them to do.
Clearly we are not fully unified. We still have 27 different budgets for example. We are still mostly borrowing as 27 different independent sovereigns for example.
> Ok, but you haven't told me what exactly the end goal of that "ever closer union" is.
That's what the legislative process of proposals, rejections and counter-proposals is all about figuring out what the end goal looks like, that's why we don't have an EU constitution and instead have the Treaty of Lisbon. The constitution was rejected in popular processes in France and the Netherlands withdrawn and an alternative proposal was made that actually made it into agreement.
You can frame that as they went around our back to do evil things. Or you know as a negotiation where both sides of an argument compromise. The key clue that this is a compromise between two sides is that no one is actually happy with the result.
> Are you saying "the ends justify the means" of this "closer integration"? With that logic, Hitler's end goal was also closer integration of Europe's countries once he conquered them all.
I am saying a closer union was what was agreed upon.
> Impossible to leave now when you joined 20+ years ago, when the EU was something completely different, which now grew beyond what you signed up for, without fucking your economy. It's called a rug pull with a dead man's switch. Try to leave and we make sure we all blow up.
The UK left 47 years after joining, it would be better off if they stayed in, but it has not been the end of the world. Also if your countrymen are pro further EU integration and you are against it, you can just leave.
> Why is Cuba a bigger issue for Ursula than what's happening in the EU? LAst time I checked Cuba is on a different continent and an insignificant trading partner of the EU.
Because god knows what is going to happen to American liquefied gas exports to the EU if they are fighting a war in the Caribbean.
>I am saying a closer union was what was agreed upon.
Again, that vague argument does not disprove my argument.
Does the end justify the means? Yes, or no? If yes, then what's the point of democracy and free will, if no, what's the point of the EU forcing its will on everyone?
>Also if your countrymen are pro further EU integration
What does "further EU integration" even mean? Being an even bigger bitch to clueless out of touch unelected bureaucrats in Brussels to deiced things in countries they can't find on the map, whose language they don't speak, whose economy and culture they don't understand?
> Impossible to leave now when you joined 20+ years ago, when the EU was something completely different, which now grew beyond what you signed up for, without fucking your economy. It's called a rug pull with a dead man's switch. Try to leave and we make sure we all blow up.
Translation: the benefits of being in the EU outweigh the drawbacks.
This is the crux of it. From your local parish council to the largest supranational organisation, nobody's going to be in favour of every decision made. They're still better than the alternative.
> Translation: the benefits of being in the EU outweigh the drawbacks.
Well, yes. But that WAS NOT what was voted upon. What was voted upon were specific proposals to change the EU and have closer integration.
The votes (there was more than one) had clear outcomes: "NO".
But in a democratic system that should be then of it! And it wasn't. But the truth is the EU has a very long history of overriding democratic votes, "for good reasons". Frankly, I even agree with the basic assessment there: that what the EU proposed was the best outcome and voters rejected it for bad reasons. But in a democracy that voters reject it is the final say.
And the problem with it is that if "rational" things can be forced through against the will of the voters ... it always ends the same way.
Ireland rejected. The treaty was modified to address the concerns of Irish voters. Ireland accepted.
"Ireland rejected, the treaty was modified, and the Irish government said 'despite your changes, we refuse to allow our electorate to revisit this'" doesn't sound like a better approach.
You're talking about the first big EU farce, the Nice Treaty. Btw: "Nice", as in the Roman city in the south of France with the excellent Carnaval, not the English word.
But then there was the second farce, the "EU constitution":
Note how many referenda and votes were planned ... but suddenly canceled after voters started rejecting the treaty. And note how the page does not say how the replacement, the "Treay of Lisbon" was adopted. Sure they would vote on it, right? Otherwise, what credibility would they have left?
Obviously there were no more votes on any EU future plans, with one exception.
I've worked for the EU Commission. Let me tell you: the bureaucrats there are angry about this. You see, the whole constitution was an attempt for the EU to become more democratic, gain credibility, by "sacrificing" power to voters. By the time the Treaty of Lisbon was created, the EU had lost power (much less than the constitution, but still some. Oh and they lost power to member states, NOT to voters), had "been forced" to push through the reforms anyway AND they had lost all credibility.
The only exception, the only vote on the EU's future? The Brexit vote ...
> Why is Cuba a bigger issue for Ursula than what's happening in the EU? LAst time I checked Cuba is on a different continent and an insignificant trading partner of the EU.
That's also because of unwarranted American sanctions.
Which for once isn't only Trump's fault, every American president has been happy to let the Cubans suffer for no reason.
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.
You won't get such analysis because the EU law making process is (a) mostly secret and (b) doesn't necessarily follow the process laid out in the treaties, making a lot of discussion purely theoretical. This has been a problem for years. The British pushed back when they were members but no longer.
The EU is increasingly hiding things from journalists, researchers and members of civil society.
Secrecy has a long tradition in the EU, but the European Commission has clearly limited the publicity of its activities during Ursula von der Leyen’s second presidency.
The commission’s new Rules of Procedure significantly limit what counts as an official document. They authorise withholding and destroying information even after a request for access has been made. The commission has, on flimsy grounds, concealed legal documents and files related to the regulation of technology giants, among other things.
It is now almost impossible to monitor how the EU uses its power, for example, in relation to large platform companies.
The EU never improves. A decade ago the same complaints were being made:
Secret EU law making reached a high in 2016 that has only been matched once before, according to figures obtained by EUobserver.
The normal process starts with a bill from the European Commission. The bill is then channelled through the European Parliament and the Council of the EU, representing member states.
If no agreement is reached at first reading, a second reading is launched. But according to figures provided by the parliament, not a single bill ended up in a second reading agreement in 2016, only the second time this has happened since EU parliament record keeping began in 2004.
“That is quite astonishing, but it is just a continuation of a trend that we have been seeing for quite a while now,” said Vicky Marissen of Pact European Affairs, a Brussels-based consultancy specialising in EU decision-making procedures.
Second readings are important because they open up the debate to the public at large. Removing this phase means the details are being agreed behind closed doors and people have to rely on insider information to understand what is happening.
- First you get the idea, framework and influence from academic "centers", foundations and Think Tanks in the US.
- Then you have the lobbying from Big Tech and specialized firms (content scan, censorship, moderation and everything "compliance") from the US, France, Israel, etc.
- Last most of your politicians are largely interested in the system to be kept in place at any cost. So mass surveillance might be the difference between a comfy life and the pitchfork in medium or long term.
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.
For Americans, this process is called a trilogue. It is analogous to the White House a group of House and Senate members meeting in private to negotiate a bill, with most related documents being heavily redacted.
MEPs can pass the resulting deal or try to amend it. But amendments often mean the bill is pulled back into another trilogue rather than properly debated and rewritten in public.
The bill never gets debated, and the bill never gets rejected, so the commission can keep trying until it gets passed
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.
It’s important to understand this is not just a rando on the internet. This is a former Member of the European Parliament who has been criticising and sharing developments on Chat Control for years. The post isn’t made in a vacuum, but made with the knowledge of everything which has happened up to now, including the “Chat Control 2.0”, which is different from what’s happening now. Every concern you see there has been discussed at length on other posts on the same website.
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.
Creating a problem, positioning yourself as the solution, and using any power you are given to exacerbate the problem, is an unfortunately-viable strategy. In theory, journalism can let the air out of the strategy, but someone's been going 'round killing or suborning the journalism organisations, so that's a bit tricky at the moment.
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.
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.
However, I do remember the conversations from that time.
I still don't have any social media other than LinkedIn that connects to my identity, and warned family against it for as long as I could.
Saying people on HN were bamboozled is ludicrous. HN is an old bastions for people who argue for privacy and anonymity. I sincerely doubt (hope) that many people would say they were fooled. That would indicate a degree of intellectual immaturity and avoidance of concequence which makes any other position held suspect.
It was clear that there was no other way this was going to go. Saying the IPO tipped the scales is also being wildly generous to firms.
Perhaps its the other side of the coin of the HN zeitgeist? faith in firms matching the distrust in government.
Facebook was started by a college kid who made a site for non-consensually rating the faces of his fellow female classmates. He called his initial users "dumb f*cks" for trusting him with their private information. Information, which he offered to share with his friend, also without consent. It was obvious from the start that Facebook was up to no good, but money and power [1] prevailed.
> 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.
> by virtue of not having any profiles and social media sites can tag you and form a shadow profile around you.
This can be done to you whether you have a profile or not. Having an actual profile likely means that you've signed onto some tos that allows them to add a lot more to your "shadow profile" and use it in more ways, and that any complaints about the treatment will go to forced arbitration.
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.
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.
>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.
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".
> 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.
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.
Where do you get your information from, exactly? In criminal and intelligence circles, this is not exactly uncommon knowledge. I hope you never experience the horror of finding out that even in federal protective custody, that military intelligence is already there waiting for you.
>ways it cannot exist with nothing to with privacy,
In the Soviet Union, for example, all medical records were accessible by the state security services, and this served legitimate national security purposes. You have no idea what it's like to be targeted by an entity like the CIA.
>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!?!?
It would be a legitimate target, tbh there might not even be much of a point in terms of practical affect. Do you have any idea how many "crimes" have been reported to the international community, only to be ignored completely by all relevant propaganda outlets?
> insert actual agents into a hospital for illegal child surgery and escape notice.
Our propaganda outlets have literally reported on, swathes of, evidence of the CIA doing exactly this. Your country was not immune to this spookery.
I have some bad news for you. This is a real scenario, likely happening within a 1000km radius of you. Military usage of brain-computer interfaces go back over a century, the experience of being an intelligence asset is nothing like you assume. Many of the assets aren't even perceptual of their human experience in a manner expected naturally. The individuals who are aware of their status, at this point, learn to be silent very quickly.
Surgery based neurological compromise is only one example of the various operations currently running rampant in NATO countries.
>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.
And your intelligence agencies won't tell you shit, they will slap a "CLASSIFIED" label on it, and continue to enjoy their cushy positions while their people continue to be exploited.
>Why do you think you can secure this incredibly invasive theoretical network
I'm just one individual who has had the great misfortune of having to deal with this spookery first-hand. You can propose the design of this system if you wish.
> all evidence from our entire history to the contrary
I'm genuinely not trying to be rude, but this line is absolutely hilarious. Depending on the country you reside in, your intelligence agencies likely are well aware of the state of neurological (again, this is just one category) compromise in your country, and aren't telling you shit.
> This is such schizobabble that makes no sense
There's a reason HIPPA has exemptions for national security purposes, to the extent in which law matters when dealing with spookery (it does not, nobody follows the fucking "law" in these operations).
Just wait until you learn about how deeply compromised the CDC is.
It would be nice to at least have the illusion of transparency in regards to, very relevant data, such as what is happening to your citizens in public hospitals. Instead the US went the opposite direction, this is not a coincidence.
> that I don't know what else to do beyond urging you to seek some alternatives to wherever you got this from.
I have been imprisoned extra-judicially, threatened with torture (I complied quickly), and served rotten food on US soil. You don't have to believe me, and I sincerely hope you never experience the horror of realizing your jailers are already compromised, nor the experience of realizing that reporting any of this is literally fucking pointless because the entire national security reporting apparatus for civilians and much of the military is deeply compromised and utterly pointless.
The US is so deeply compromised that it's a joke. Your media is failing you spectacularly in this regard.
>Would you prefer these people to have access to all of your communications? Or would you like to be able to legally encrypt your messages?
I'm saying the entire security model regarding electronics is completely irrelevant. The same entities who have compromised the US deeply have been operating since long before the personal computer, and even telecommunications broadly. I do not care about what is on my computer, when they can easily kidnap, poison, or bless me with any of the other fun systems military intelligence has to offer.
Your national security apparatus has __good reason__ to be gathering any intelligence it can. I'd gladly hand over any piece of data to any agency which requests it, or anybody else really. These computers are toys.
>Yeah this reads like a psychotic episode, so let me try the short version.
You made my day brighter by repeating this propaganda, thank you for that.
Anybody reading this who might be a little less indoctrinated, ask your favorite language model about the history of CIA black sites and specifically the CIA's involvement in deep-brain stimulation and similar technologies. This has been publicized for __decades__.
And then realize this propaganda is a tiny, tiny, tiny portion of the spookery that has been running amok in the United States for a little under a century at this point.
You have absolutely no clue just how badly the national security complex has failed it's citizens in the US, and NATO more broadly.
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.
Anna's Archive is not a single point of failure. It is a duplication effort of tens of other shadow libraries.
You cannot "upload" directly to Anna's Archive for example. It must appear on other sites like Libgen or Z-Library.
Downloads are served by different "partner" servers, almost no downloads come directly from Anna's Archive, they are all distributed around to other servers.
Almost the entire Anna's Archive datasets are available as torrents, which are intentionally to avoid a "single point of failure". [1]
If Anna's Archive shut down tomorrow, almost every single file would still be accessible, albeit in a slightly less convenient manner. The whole system is not flawless, the sheer size of the content is hard to handle, but its one of the best efforts in the space and calling Anna's Archive a single point of failure seems disingenuous to me. I recommend reading Anna's Archive FAQ's and Blogs for more information.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bot detection in the case where the activity is not human like e.g. spam, is quite easy to detect. But the problem here is that a foreign influence bot is not like that at all. It is designed to act like a human. And the areas that foreign bots attack are also political issues that the domestic population cares about, so you can't really filter by content either.
You could still mitigate this by blocking accounts that use VPN IPs or requiring invasive IDV for accounts, but isn't this sort of thing exactly the type of authoritarian user monitoring that we would like to avoid?
I don't really get you point about removing surveillance style ad tech. Wouldn't that just make it even harder to detect foreign influence accounts?
Following the earlier example of Xitter, there are loads of accounts that are obvious bots or foreign propaganda outfits to anybody who's been using the site for a while, complete with a reasonably good litmus test: whenever you suspect a post is from one of these, check the posting account's location. For me the accounts that raise internal red flags are almost always posting from SE Asia, somewhere in Africa, Russia, etc.
That means their content and profile quirks follow clear patterns that are not that difficult to distinguish. Xitter just has no financial or legal incentive to do so.
> I don't really get you point about removing surveillance style ad tech. Wouldn't that just make it even harder to detect foreign influence accounts?
The difference is the invasiveness of the data gathered and who it's given to. For bot/troll/propaganda mitigation, invasiveness is comparably minimal (survelliance advertising isolates marketable qualities such as race, orientation, religion, marital status, purchasing habits, etc; none of these are necessary for mitigation) and gathered data never needs to leave the possession of the social network.
That, unlike other proposed solutions, would certainly work. The problem is that these political fracture points are there because of opposing interests between different groups in society. This can be easily solved in more authoritarian government structures by simply choosing a winner and a loser, but in democracy not so much.
And while I don't have any doubt in my mind that there are foreign entities working to exploit these fracture points, I am very skeptical that they are the main cause of problems here. We have seen such fracture points arise and cause political strife up to the point of civil wars many times throughout history without such foreign instigation.
No, most of these are due to corruption and populism, also lack of interest in solving real problems. It's pretty simple to understand.
Foreign entities (a particular one really) is a tool used by corrupt politicians in each country. Eventually your political field becomes "who is the biggest traitor" and then you're finished, fascism is the only direction this is headed towards. This is your real destination, very closely modeled after that one foreign entity you have in mind. It already went through all these phases.
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.
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).
You can't restrain the power of the Council. The Council is the member states. What you're proposing would take power away from the member states and hand it to, who? People already think the EU is undemocratic, imagine after that.
The main problem is that people still do not understand how the EU works. They don't understand that almost everything comes from the direction the member states push from the Council.
And in fact, I think the member states like it that way, or why else wouldn't they educate people more?
There are many ways to restrain the Council that'd make the EU more democratic: enforce more/full transparency into the Council's decision-making, expand the powers of the Parliament (making the Council into the upper house basically), enforce the Spitzenkandidat method for appointing the EC President, allow referenda on major issues to bypass the Council.
None of these is perfect, but they would streamline the democratic processes within the EU by lessening the role of the Council as intermediary.
I agree that the Council themselves would never allow that however.
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 with 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.
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.
>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
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.
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.
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...
> 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.
That's not what I'm doing. I'm pointing out some of the benefits of the EU, and I'm sure you've seen that this was not the only benefit I listed. Of course the influence of lobbying is still bad, and the EU should take steps to fix that.
I'm just pointing out that "an organisation something does something bad, therefore it shouldn't exist at all" is a bad argument that ignores the good it does.
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?
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.
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.
I meant it like a retailer can buy it without the charge in bulk with a discount, but since the consumers can't, the retailer can increase the price. So the consumer pays more because of a middleman charging the difference.
Ideally there is enough competition between retailers, but obviously that is not true if the consumers are buying from china in the first place.
Instead of adding a fee, you should make the bulk imported item cheaper. If you can't compete then something is wrong, maybe something in single import being subsidized like air mail? If it's not then it's a more efficient system.
And I'm strictly talking about exact same products produced in china, not equivalent products of worse quality.
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.
> 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.
It is, because (one of) the big problem(s) is people impulse buying individual cheap things in large numbers, taking advantage of free shipping when the shipping is obviously not free. These stores exploit the fact that international postage and customs agreements were never written with a giant volume of small parcels in mind, making it artificially cheap (for the sender) to spam the system with them.
> 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.
The EU is going to have to accept this increase in anti-EU sentiment, it will only ever increase as long as the EU has the democratic deficit that it has. It is what's both permitting this overreach, and the powerlessness to do something about it is what is breeding the anti-EU sentiment.
The problem begins and ends with the fact that there is just no realistic way to hold these people accountable. I don't know what it would take for people, across the EU, to consider punishing EU politicians to be more important than selecting their national government. A genocide, maybe? Something of that severity, no doubt. Certainly not something as pesky as instating a digital Stasi.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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 :)
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.
EU became a thing in 1993. And soon after Europe could not keep up with US of A anymore. Even though USSR was gone, EU expanded and so on. Coincidence?
IMO it's conflict of interest of some short-sighted naive idealists vs people who want to get stuff done.
For example, solar. Shit ton of euromoneys is poured into subsidies. But those subsidies are not geofenced. Thus vast majority of people go for chinese stuff. It could have been much better to subsidise locally produced components only. Then price would be +/- the same.
Now chinese components are dirt cheap with all the subsidies. I myself went for chinese components, because break-even period was like 5 vs 10 years. I'll just pihole the inverter from calling home once I figure out how to get some statistics without the manufacturer's app.
I guess some people decided it's better to get 2-3x more solar installed power ASAP rather than prop up the local solar industry.
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.
Yeah they are really racist, sorry but I have no other way of putting it. They even have a law where they can evict and destroy a building when there's "too many" non-western immigrants living there. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/18/denmark-ghetto...
Hungary is often called out as a black sheep but Denmark is a wolf in sheep's clothes.
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.
I think it's a more useful analysis to add a second dimension than to try to project everything onto 'left' and 'right' (in the style of the .
Axis 1 - civil & political rights: In favour of broad social & political rights (down) -> In favour of few social and political rights a.k.a. authoritarianism (up)
Axis 2 - economy: In favour of social responsibility / society ensuring people's needs are met (in the sense of 'from each according to ability, and to each according to need') (left) -> In favour of individual responsibility and a laissez faire economic freedoms (right).
On this 2d view, Social Democrats are nominally lower left, while Chat Control is an authoritarian policy (i.e. appealing to anyone on the top half of the coordinate system), so it would run counter to their nominal values.
Note that there is a significant number of the economic left who are nominally authoritarian (see for example Stalinist / Maoists), and likewise for the right so it doesn't make sense to project that as a left/right thing.
That helps slightly, and this version is often favored by libertarians, but I prefer the “8 values” or 8 dimension test that also looks at diplomatic, technological, and religious dimensions. I think I’ve also seen a 9 dimension version.
A multifactor values-based approach better maps niche positions and explains why there are often irreconcilable disagreements among large blocs that are otherwise compatible. For instance, there will always be recurring tensions between progressives and leftcoms despite their neighboring positions on the 4-quadrant political compass. And right-wing secular monarchists don’t really get along with theocrats either.
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.
>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?
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.
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)
Well I have gotten the feeling that MEPs are those that do not make it on country level... Still, doesn't mean that they don't in general follow what their own political parties want.
Which is why the whole idea of political parties is the main travesty of the fake democracy they promote to enforce their own goals over population.
> 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]
All the referendums I can recall (French and Dutch in 00s, Italian recently, Greek and British) were all resounding “No”’s… plus the rise of the far right is kinda hard to miss…
> Gallup, March 2025: No country approves of their own leadership, or that of U.S., over the EU [2]
That’s literally insane. I don’t believe it. I have yet to find someone who is fond of the EU leadership. lol. …
That peace in Europe didn't start because of the EU, it started because western Europe was conquered by the US and eastern Europe by USSR so they were a bit too incapacitated to fight each other under those conditions and given the much bigger issues they had at the time.
Yes, and the European Coal & Steel community didn't stop the slaughter, the nuclear powered US stopped did. The stopped slaughtering wouldn't have continued without the EU. Everyone in Europa couldn't have kept doing it even if they wanted to with 80 US military based on the continent.
You give the EU too much credit for peace. In fact, there's way more tensions between EU countries now as EU members than in the past. Poland even went to buy weapons from Korea and build them on-shore because they don't trust buying weapons from France and Germany. Just because EU countries aren't slaughtering each other, doesn't mean they like or trust each other.
You can say what you want, but take any history book and you will see that what we got now is the longest period in history without a war between European countries. They don't fully trust each other? OK, but this is still a great improvement over the past.
The EU is pushing the member countries e.g. regarding climate change. Not that it is enough, but it is something.
Also the EU tries to do some privacy stuff, antitrust (when it doesn't get bullied by the US), etc.
I feel like ChatControl is really about some lobbyists making a lot of noise and politicians not competent to understand how cryptography works. People say "that's because the ruling class wants surveillance over the citizens", but I believe it's incompetence. Just like the "ruling class" doesn't want to screw humanity by not addressing climate change and the current mass extinction: they are just not competent enough to understand the problem.
And that's the reflection of the people who elect them. Go in the street and ask random people what they understand about E2EE. In good approximation, they have no idea how it works. Worse: they don't give a damn. How would they elect people who are competent about it?
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.
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
The largest Dutch tech website doesn’t adhere to the cookie law. They ever reported about websites not adhering to the law while not adhering to the law themselves.
"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.
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.
GDPR legally prohibits tracking in general, not cookies specifically. Advertisers use fingerprinting more than cookies these days already, even if browsers removed cookie support altogether it wouldn't change anything.
> 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.
Opting out of cookies does not mean no tracking. Tracking companies moved away from cookies a decade ago and now fingerprint the browser through JS in very subtle ways.
And the banners are not about cookies specifically, they are about tracking. It's illegal to track people without a lawful reason (and one of the valid reasons is user consent).
What are you supposed to learn from the banner anyway? It's just an additional annoyance.
You should just assume that anything that your browser exposed may be used to track you. The real problem is that most browsers and browser configurations are far too permissive for the sake of avoiding breakage. The real technical solution to online tracking is standardization of browser attributes so that users look identical, and only allowing for very limited and coarse measurement of client-side user interaction.
> The real technical solution to online tracking is standardization of browser attributes so that users look identical
As long as the web is an applications platform rather a hypertext document platform there will always be enough small differences to fingerprint. There is never going to be a technical solution, the solution is going to have to be social (legal, e.g. the GDPR).
But the GDPR does not achieve anything in practice. You get annoying cookie/tracking banners that you are effectively forced to accept in order to use the website, and companies keep collecting data. They promise not to misuse the data, but we all know that they still will. Enforcement is very difficult because it is impossible to audit every tech firm out there, so you are essentially relying on leaks and whistleblowers for the truth to come out. A complete ban on data collection not directly provided by the user would have been more effective overall, even though you still face the same enforcement issue.
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.
> 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.
The problem is that's not what anybody, including the users, want. Nobody cares that browsers have cookies as an implementation detail. It's a ridiculous thing to use as the basis of a privacy rule. Does the user care that the site uses cookies to implement a shopping cart feature? Does the user not care that the site is tracking them without cookies using device fingerprinting? Cookies were never the problem.
On top of that, they were the thing the users already had control over. Browsers allow you to delete or reject cookies, provide private browsing modes that don't submit them, etc.
Meanwhile the things that would actually be useful, like prohibiting services from requiring the user to provide a phone number (a de facto cross-service cross-device tracking ID) in order use the service, or requiring device attestation (which uniquely identifies the device), are left unaddressed.
I am eagerly awaiting your grassroots campaign to define legislation that would tackle such uses, and also eagerly awaiting it backfiring because of malicious compliance.
Malicious compliance is a result of incompetent drafting. It's common because incompetent drafting is common, case in point GDPR. It's definitely possible to screw it up less than that -- there are many laws that nobody complains about.
You pass a law prohibiting any entity from conditioning the use of their service on the user providing them with a phone number. Even services that actually use SMS or voice calls are required to provide an alternative like email or the web with no reduction in functionality and for no additional cost.
You pass a law stating that any device which is sold or leased to anyone who takes physical possession of it cannot contain a private key the customer is unable to both read and extricate at no cost.
What does malicious compliance look like there? Anyone can give them an email instead of a phone number and if that doesn't work they're in violation. Remote attestation is the only reason for devices to come from the factory containing an inaccessible private key, which is thereby prohibited and unable to be used as a tracking ID.
The law contains some ridiculous language about storing data on the user's device, which applies to cookies in particular even though that category in general makes no coherent sense, because the thing that should matter is if you can identify the user/device, not whether you used something in the shape of a cookie to do it.
> 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.
> 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.
I agree that governments could be better at monopoly busting and that a wide variety of choice is better (here in Belgium there are enough different parties (the Greens, the Socialists, the Labour Party, the Christian Democrats, the Liberals, some right wing parties,...) that it seems to work okay, but I gather that elsewhere there's a dearth of choice).
The biggest problem with 'voting with my wallet' is that it means we get the bad old democracy back: the poor don't get to vote, the rich get to vote more. That may have been good enough a few centuries ago, but nowadays we have universal suffrage and I think we can all agree that's better. I know in the USA there's been some back and forth about it regarding voter ID laws (getting an ID costs money so it penalizes the poor) and the fact that people who can only vote by going to the poll office may get penalized by their employers (who can dock wages for the time the employee spent not working); but technically there is universal suffrage and it's better than what came before.
> The biggest problem with 'voting with my wallet' is that it means we get the bad old democracy back: the poor don't get to vote, the rich get to vote more.
The thing about "vote with your wallet" is that it's not actually a tabulation. Poor people wouldn't get a "vote" as to which yacht companies succeed or fail because they don't buy yachts, but for the same reason, why should they then care anything about yacht companies?
Conversely, the ordinary person still buys necessities, and at scale buys them in larger numbers than rich people do, because the majority of people aren't rich. So the companies making the things ordinary people actually buy do have to be responsive to them.
> I know in the USA there's been some back and forth about it regarding voter ID laws (getting an ID costs money so it penalizes the poor) and the fact that people who can only vote by going to the poll office may get penalized by their employers (who can dock wages for the time the employee spent not working)
The whole thing is so dumb. Just require ID to vote and then don't charge any fees to get an ID. Just open the polls at 8PM the eve of election day and keep them open a full contiguous 24 hours so that nobody has to come during work hours regardless of what shift they work.
> but technically there is universal suffrage and it's better than what came before.
"Technically" seems to be doing a lot of work there, because the actual problems have nothing to do with people not being able to get off work to vote.
The main one is that you have a ballot with a small, finite number of viable candidates and none of them represent your interests. In many cases they all have the same position on a particular issue and that position is different from yours. Even when their positions differ, the ones you agree with don't align.
Candidate A supports zoning reform and opposes alternative energy, Candidate B opposes zoning reform and supports alternative energy, you want both zoning reform and alternative energy, therefore you're screwed into flipping a coin. And so is everyone else, which means the politicians don't actually have to do what anybody wants because most of the votes are people who didn't like any of the candidates holding their nose to choose the one they think is the lesser evil, only to have their vote canceled out by someone who 90% agrees with them on everything but came out the other way on the coin flip.
> refuse to learn from falling behind the US economically
The EU economy has been slowing down since 2007, the peak production of conventional oil. The US is still producing oil, which is why the US economy is better.
People love to think that they are richer or more successful because they are smarter. The fact is that the economy goes up when there is an abundance of energy, period.
So there is nothing to learn from falling behind the US economically, other than "the EU needs to adapt to the reality of its economy measurably slowing down". And following the US and their lack of regulations and tendency towards a fascist economy (with BigTech working together with the ruling class) is not the right direction, IMO.
> I see a lot of pro-EU content on this site when they're terrible on both tech and entrepreneurship.
Tech and entrepreneurs usually want to become rich by producing more. The best places to do that are where the is money, which is where the economy grows, which is where there is an abundance of cheap fossil fuels.
Entrepreneurs usually say "remove the regulations and our economy will grow again", but what they mean, really, is "remove the regulations and I will get rich, because I am on the side of those who would benefit from it".
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.
We French still get higher life expectancy, more free time, free education and healthcare... GDP per Capita is a terrible metric.
Not claiming that everything's sunshine and rainbows over here, but at least we aren't ruled by a proto fascist pedo actively ridding the country of its democratic institutions and destroying public service after public service to give more wealth to his pedo friends.
> 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.
I meant the policemen of course. They were never tried for manslaughter or even fired(?). So at least in this case the lack of accountability is similar what is regularly happening in the US.
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.
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.
Agreed, but there's always the possibility of a referendum or even an initiative, to oversteer a decision of the representatives, given enough supporters.
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 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.
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.
> you just have to provide USB-C option as a fallback.
Given you must have a USB-C port, the design would still be limited by the USB-C form factor and adding another port would even further increase the complexity, costs and weight of the design. This will still strongly limit the spread of new designs, and I'm pretty sure it's effectively equivalent to mandating just USB-C for smaller devices.
I see how this could be an issue for small devices, but this wouldn't stop a company from testing a new connector on bigger ones: laptops still have one or more USB-A ports, despite USB-C being common now. So having an additional connector other than USB-C isn't an issue.
The point is, if the regulation works as intended, it consolidates USB-C as the standard and slows or blocks new types of ports from being designed and tested. If it doesn't, then it's useless. You can't have it both ways.
Imagine a company that wants to design the next type of port. Normally, it would just do R&D and engineer the product, then put it on the market with that type of port. If the device only has that type of port, people must use it and provide feedback by choosing to keep buying the product (maybe they'll also make it explicit that they like the new port). If this phase is successful and the company opens the specs and other companies adopt it, it might become a de facto standard.
Now consider doing it with the current regulation. You need to do R&D, but the design will require higher costs because you have to make the device work with the old USB-C, too.
Maybe it's not a high cost for the company, so they do it anyway. People might use the port much less because some may not even try the new port and stick to the USB-C for simplicity, or because they are accustomed to it.
So the company won't have the same strong feedback. But let's assume they manage to make most users happy to use the new one because it's so much better.
Now they open the standard. Other companies have to pay the additional engineering costs to add the other port. Some might be able to afford it just fine, while others might not want to add the complexity and costs of two ports.
Let's say, however, it spreads anyway. Now you hope the EU will accept it as a new standard so you can ditch the now-old USB-C standard. But the EU might just say "NO". It's very hard to predict if the government would be happy with it.
Given the compounding of these effects, the result is most likely that the company won't even think about wanting to develop the next standard.
The probability of a new standard happening is much reduced. And as I said before, if it weren't reduced, then the regulation would be useless to begin with, as people would use and test different connectors regardless of the USB-C support.
As I said in the root comment, I don't care too much about the connectors not evolving, but it just goes to show that people don't realise that there is no free lunch. Add constraints, and you add costs and slow down progress.
You can't force companies to add value with no costs, and value is also subjective, so the government often doesn't know what is valuable to people. At most, the government might know what some people say is valuable to them. But this is not the same thing.
Very few people would have said smartphones were the future, and they would buy one in 2007. Democracy is a very bad way for economic and technological progress to happen - unless it's for some military technology for which the government is the only customer.
> slows or blocks new types of ports from being designed and tested
No
> If the device only has that type of port, people must use it and provide feedback by choosing to keep buying the product (maybe they'll also make it explicit that they like the new port)
When getting something out on the market, they woudn't take this risk and still have a commonly used port on the side. The consumers as well would prefer to not take the risk of buing a device forcing them to use a port no other device is using.
> So the company won't have the same strong feedback
For the above reason, in the situation you describe, the feedback wouldn't be worth much, or at most it would be as worth as the situation with a more common port on the side. In one case, customers may refrain from buying the device with only the new port, because there isn't a wide market of accessories using that port yet (and not because they don't like it). In the other, the signal could be weak as consumers could just ignore the new port and keep buying the device due to the old port still being there.
I apologize, but I only skimmed the rest of your comment, because I believe it rests on a flawed premise in the first line.
> When getting something out on the market, they woudn't take this risk and still have a commonly used port on the side. The consumers as well would prefer to not take the risk of buing a device forcing them to use a port no other device is using.
Like, people didn't buy Apple products before they were forced to use USB-C? So why did Apple not want to use USB-C if that caused them to lose money and sell fewer phones?
Also, if this were true, once most devices support USB-C (like they already did before the regulation), the standard would be self-enforcing and require no additional regulation.
> I apologize, but I only skimmed the rest of your comment, because I believe it rests on a flawed premise in the first line.
Given your statements contradict historical facts, I'd probably think a bit more before concluding that.
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.
That's a good example of the mindset that is turning the EU into a backwater. Paraphrased you're saying there's no problem with the EU banning new technologies because the Americans can always be relied on to make progress anyway, and then Europe can just copy whatever they do.
So there seems to be some confusion over premises in this thread.
The people pointing out the USB-C law as a failure are reasoning from the Golden Rule: what would happen if everyone did this? Nobody would design new connectors because of the catch-22 the law creates. You can't know what the next new connector should be without a competitive market, but governments have ended such a market. Also, to invest in a new technology requires a belief that you can actually launch it and gain profit by outcompeting other technologies, but government mandated monopolies prevent that, so there's just no incentive to do the work anymore.
The people arguing the USB-C law is fine are reasoning from a different and totally local perspective: why shouldn't we implement a command economy in Europe when we'll get the benefits of a free market economy by importing US goods anyway? They assume new tech will be developed for the US market and then all the EU has to do is have a committee that approves it.
The problem with this idea, beyond it being just pathetic, is there's no reason the US has to sell to Europe and the more annoying the EU makes trade the fewer technologies will be available for import. It's already common that new US tech products either don't launch in Europe or launch much later. Now frontier models are being restricted and not made available to European companies, that will make them fall even further behind. And we can assume that when a new connector is designed that's better than USB-C products designed around it will launch everywhere except Europe for a while, as only some products will have enough sales to justify an EU specific variant. So Europeans will eventually get used to not being able to acquire many products at home because import is blocked by the EU.
What's interesting to me is that this is a bit like how the USSR worked.
They were relying on the West for high-tech tractors and even to build factories (I know Ford helped them build some factories for a part of the factory output).
I also know they used to look at the allocation of goods in the US as a starting point to decide what to produce, as they were basically running blind to what people needed or wanted.
> if I wanted to buy a device with a new type of connector, I should have been able to
You are. Nothing prevents the manufacturers to support other better charging solutions than USB-C. In fact many notebooks has their proprietary connectors and some smartphones use custom signaling over custom USB cable to provide better experience while complying with the regulation and support USB-C charging, too.
If I wanted to buy a device with a different type of connector, including a different form factor or a totally different charging mechanism, I should be able to do so without additional costs or additional holes drilled in the case of the device.
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.
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...
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).
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.
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.
That might be true, but does not contradict the parent: if the design of the EU overall allows this to happen, it is indeed very undemocratic. How does the fact that the EP rejected it (multiple times), help the population of the EU states, that never pushed for this? Even worse: your argument implies, that the EU is enabling national politicians to push through unpopolar decisions, that likely would have no chance on a purely national stage.
People just tend to pay a lot less attention to how their national governments act on the EU.
The solution is not to throw the EU away, it is a massive good for all countries involved, it is to fucking hold your national governments accountable, and to demand more direct participation in the EU.
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.
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?!
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.
> In the past
Exactly. That time is mostly over.
It doesn't have to be though. There is countless benefits to decentralized and federated platforms, even for your average Joe.
It's just that all the Google, Microsoft, and Meta platforms had shiny new features and we all switched. There is no real reason we can't go back, sure the network effect is hard to overcome but the technological problem is moderately simple to solve (we did it in the past!)
And coming back again:
> As part of changing laws in Europe, Meta now offers the option for you to chat with others using third-party messaging apps that have integrated with WhatsApp and that you choose to turn on. - Whatsapp Help Center
Currently support is a bit shit, given it's relatively new. Give it 3-5 years and I'm sure this will look very different.
Yes but it's the same EU that mandates this. If they can mandate interoperability they will just mandate their backdoor at the same time
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.
> So in the real world a relatively small number of providers.
Why do we even need providers? Locally store the convos on each device and there's not a need for the server.
No normal user wants that. You would still need some infrastructure to link users with IPs, and if you lose your device, all your chats are gone.
> You would still need some infrastructure to link users with IPs
I thought we cracked this with P2P streaming? I know torrents have trackers but can't we do some kind of multicast kind of thing, completely P2P?
> it's not like internet is made of a few select providers
In practice it is. Almost all messaging happens on a few apps.
> also the most widely available apps already comply to the single police request to access conversations from suspects
That is not true: Signal is widely available and doesn't do that. WhatsApp probably doesn't do it either.
Don't get me wrong: I am against ChatControl as well. I believe that security comes at the cost of freedom, and it is a choice to be made on a case-per-case basis. Removing E2EE for everybody is not worth it, because criminals will always be able to use encryption one way or another. The problem is that politicians don't seem to understand it.
They do understand it but what they want is not just criminals' data but all of us.
They want to pick the easy fruit. The dumb criminals that would do that sort of thing over whatsapp.
Yes, but this easy fruit has a flavor of the week:
https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/ben-werdmuller-signal-z...
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/coun...
> Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.
Like, you can get 30 years in prison now for moving some boxes with zines in them, just because you are anti-fascist.
Yes, this is American politics; but don't think that the benevolent overloads of the EU don't plan for this same outcome: Already in many European countries, I can go to prison for just saying, "Free Palestine". They want it so that people cannot even say that in private.
Listen I agree, but the solution to this problem is not social media mediated pseudo-anonymity the operators know who you are and they are working with them.
The solution is keeping fascists of the levers of power which America has done an incredibly bad job at for the last 10 years.
If you really want to have free speech, you need to be in your own domain and that is going to be increasingly dangerous as you have noted too. So you know I see antifa tor services run out of servers in Europe in your future.
I totally agree, the problem is difficult however because even if we create a perfectly anonymous system for registering with social media, modern LLMs make semantic analysis trivial. It's going to be impossible to remain anonymous without also using an LLM to strip the unique footprint of your text. Which leads to a very strange and monotonous culture for internet discussions. Might be unavoidable, though, at least for certain kinds of discussions.
Yes this is indeed a problem. But this is even more reason to keep private conversations private. It will stop those LLMs learning your footprint from your private conversations.
It's an interesting thing what you're saying. I've been thinking about this happening (I think it's inevitable) and also about using an LLM to sanitise my semantic footprint.
Yeah, it's been on my mind since the original transformers paper, because persona and identity management has been a long-time interest of mine. Both offensive and defensive tooling, such as fingerprinting and anti-fingerprinting.
If you're interested in building an open source persona management suite to distribute as freedom software and level the playing field against State agents who are already building and improving such tools, I would love to find a partner to help with such a project. Even if you don't code, there are other duties besides coding involved with successfully promoting such a project and developing a community around it.
Yes I work in cyber and I've always thought about the ability for fingerprinting people by their content. Not really semantically (that was just not really possible until LLMs came up) but more in terms of interests on social media.
But semantic analysis adds a whole new level with so much entropy that it's bound to be unique. And LLMs are just ideal for pattern recognition. There's not much we can do about that as a human, trying to fool it won't work. It really needs an artificial sanitiser. One that really builds a persona and aligns to it deeply (like little colloquialisms from the purported origin of the persona).
And also things like comment posting hours. I have identified several accounts from people who said they were chatting with me and I could prove they were doing something completely different at that same time. Us humans aren't consistent enough for that. Especially if you have multiple sockpuppets.
I don't think I could help much with that though. I'm neither a developer nor a promotor, I'm too much of an introvert for that. But it sounds really interesting.
But yeah I'm sure that within 5 years, if you are still writing comments yourself, it won't matter whether they know your phone number or email address, you will be uniquely identified by just what you write. I wouldn't be surprised if the darker forces in society have this capability already.
There was a thread not too long ago where someone did stylometric analysis on HN, and quite a few users had true positive matches (though there were plenty false positives).
They later pulled the dataset, but antirez recreated it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016
https://antirez.com/news/150
You can try the demo here: https://antirez.com/hnstyle
but your account is too young to be in the dataset. You could ask an LLM to recrunch the numbers with a newer dataset, though.
> but your account is too young to be in the dataset.
This is on purpose yes. I've taken to rotating my accounts everywhere on a semi-regular basis as a feeble low-effort mitigation that I'm sure will not hold once this gets into full blown deployment.
I know the HN community frowns on that but it's not like I rotate every day. Probably should for it to be effective though.
Thanks for the link I will try that out! I missed that happening.
WhatsApp already does it for unencrypted messages for about half of the EU under the purview of the rules of lawful interception obligations for NI-ICS, as well as Norway, Switzerland and the UK.
When they want to read encrypted messages they seize the phone and use Cellebrite or similar 3rd Party tooling to gain physical user-level access. No need for cert-pinning or esoteric MITM attacks.
N.B. China does not allow WeChat to have e2e encryption.
> When they want to read encrypted messages they seize the phone
That is very, very different from mass surveillance.
The whole point of end to end encryption is that providers cannot comply with police request to access conversations. A properly secured system would make it impossible without compromise of your device. Now i don't know what signal does, but I am almost certain WhatsApp can just lie about your contacts keys and man in the middle the connection.
> Now i don't know what signal does
That makes me question how much you know about end-to-end encrypted messengers, because Signal is the gold standard.
> I am almost certain WhatsApp can just lie about your contacts keys and man in the middle the connection.
The problem there is that WhatsApp is not open source, so you can't check. So obviously you have to trust. But there are many, many employees who have access to the WhatsApp sources, so if it was not implementing what it says it is, chances are that someone would have said it. Also thanks to the EU DMA we have some protocol published by WhatsApp.
> But there are many, many employees who have access to the WhatsApp sources, so if it was not implementing what it says it is, chances are that someone would have said it.
No one in Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL, Skype, or Apple said anything about PRISM. We had to wait for the NSA whistleblower. So the argument someone would say something does not really stand up to historical precedent.
I looked a bit into it and yeah they have a key transparency mechanism where they store a blockchain on s3.
So supposedly they can't just add a key for a user in secret. But still what if they do it in public does the client refuse to send messages to new keys?
It's not like we are all spending all our time going over a random s3 bucket to say `Aha, I am sure Bob didn't add this new key because he logged in from his desktop. It has to be a man in the middle`
Can they just siphon keys of your device? Can they just deploy a special version to just your device without the vast majority of engineers in meta even knowing about the compromised version? No one knows. Well no one in public.
The gold standard would be personally managed keys, exchanged and signed by your contacts in person, open source software that is not auto-updating, distributed over a channel that does not know your identity.
> It's not like we are all spending all our time going over a random s3 bucket to say `Aha, I am sure Bob didn't add this new key because he logged in from his desktop. It has to be a man in the middle`
That's not how key transparency works. The whole point of key transparency is that you don't have to do that.
If you are into manually checking that you have the right key, you can do it by scanning a QR code (or exchanging the key manually through some trusted channel), both on Signal and WhatsApp.
> Can they just siphon keys of your device?
Whoever hacks your device can read the messages, end-to-end encryption protects the data in transit, not at rest.
> Can they just deploy a special version to just your device
If you get WhatsApp through the Play Store, they would need to collude with Google to do that. But it is technically possible. If you get WhatsApp on the web it's a lot easier though: they can just serve you a different codebase this one time. BTW ProtonMail can do that too, or any webapp. Which I assume is why Signal doesn't have a web version.
> The gold standard would be personally managed keys, exchanged and signed by your contacts in person, open source software that is not auto-updating, distributed over a channel that does not know your identity.
You can get the sources of Signal, audit them yourself, compile them yourself, and verify the key with your contacts through a trusted channel (in person if you like). That is already possible.
> No one in Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL, Skype, or Apple said anything about PRISM
I think it is pretty different. Was PRISM available in the code source in the mono repo of all those companies? WhatsApp is.
[dead]
> The problem is that politicians don't seem to understand it.
The problem is that politicians were corrupted by power.
This is an extremely naive view of politics in complex systems like the EU. We're not talking about the US of French president here. The people in the 27 EU countries elect their EU representatives, and nobody knows them. People usually vote for a party, and they usually don't care much about the EU, except for complaining.
It feels like people who are against the EU vote for far-right politicians (the ones that are against the EU).
EU politicians are elected by the people and they represent what the people from the 27 member countries voted. Which is different from e.g. the US president, where the people don't really have much choice. Same in France, where people voted against the far-right and not at all for Macron.
> which is hilarious coming after the Files.
Files?
Epstein
this is rational because pedophiles are not a threat to the state. if they were, the bill would look very different.
A modest proposal: have governments consist of underage girls.
Just 4 countries are against: Czech Republic, Italy, Netherlands, and Poland.
https://fightchatcontrol.eu/
That is misleading, it's a eu parliament thing, it hinges on MEPs votes not countries. At the council level i.e intergovernmental, every one has veto powers, 4 would be enough to stop this for practically ever.
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.
EU law 101: (1) EU Commission (i.e. the executive) proposes a law; (2) EU Parliament signs off on it; (3) EU Council (i.e. the equivalent of a senate, comprising national governments) puts the final stamp on it.
The complicating factor being that a given law may or may not require unanimity at the final EU Council stage.
In general, the governments have the final word.
The Council of the European Union (what you probably mean by EU Council) isn't a senate. Its meetings are theoretically attended by ministers related to a specific topic area, so an agricultural law might be attended by agricultural ministers, but in practice that often doesn't happen and functionaries are rubber stamping laws without reading or debating them. Almost all the "votes" pass unanimously or with a single abstention / no vote.
One issue is that there are so many such laws that they are hardly ever reported in local media, so people just don't know about them and governments themselves don't try to inform anyone either. Then governments blame the EU once a law is already passed and tell citizens that it's now impossible to change because the EU Commission would refuse to propose a repeal or amendment.
It's often hypothesized that governments love this process because it lets them pass laws they know voters will hate without taking direct blame for it.
Yes, I fully understand the functioning, I was just trying to keep things simple. Even Europeans don't understand this, Americans must be lost. "Council of the EU" vs "EU Council" is next-level opacity. Since the latter doesn't technically exist, I find it helpful as a less syllabic synonym for the former (where it can sit neatly alongside EU Parliament and EU Commission, leaving nobody confused). That leaves the European Council, i.e. the periodic flagship permutation of the Council. This is indeed a senate-like entity in Montesquieuian terms, that wasn't my idea.
Obviously I agree with all your other points.
The EU council is not like the senate. It's the council of the executives of the member states i.e. the meeting of the governments of the states, summit meetings happen between prime ministers and presidents.
Chat control though will definitely not make it to a summit meeting, and almost definitely does not warrant unanimity, it's probably a simple majority issue, i.e not foreign relations, defense, etc.
The European Council, i.e. the highest instance of the regular Council, is indeed like a senate in plenary, with the routine Council meetings being comparable to committees. This is not an original idea. I was just trying to simplify things because otherwise it is all extremely opaque.
Otherwise agreed.
The EU is predicated on the pooled sovereignty of its constituent countries, as exercised thought the EU Council. Apart from a limited number of certain matters, any EU country can veto any decision made by the EU Commission, or indeed the EU Parliament.
There's a lot of flip-flopping. I'm surprised Italy changed their mind when they were very in favour until recently.
I guess that’s how it eventually goes through. When, at random, enough flippers flop or floppers flip that it tips the balance.
And once it’s done it’s done. The relentlessness does not continue into, “are you sure?”, it’ll be over.
For the record, I’m in the EU and do not want this to pass.
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?
> Wasn't this rejected not so long ago?
And that's the issue with all bad laws. They have to approve it once. We have to fight against indefinitely…
What part of "you guys are irrelevant Internet weirdos and you're going to lose everything you thought you had" don't you people understand?
Last time was in march, now it is about every 3 months.
This "keep asking until they say yes" strategy is by design and has been a common tactic used by the EU power centers in the past. See the way the Treaty of Lisbon was rejected in referendums, and then people were just made to vote again. Or the way the British pro-EU faction proclaimed in 2016 that Leave/Remain was a once in a generation vote to settle the issue for all time, then immediately started agitating for an aptly named People's Vote that would rerun the referendum again.
The EU is not a democratic system. It's specifically designed to undermine and eventually end the post-WW2 democracies through a mix of deception and bureaucratic manipulation. The never ending Chat Control story is a totally standard example. That's not a conspiracy theory either, there are lots of quotes from senior EU figures where they say all this stuff directly:
> If it's a 'Yes,' we will say "On we go!" and if it's a 'No' we will say "We continue!" (Junker, talking about the votes on the Lisbon Treaty)
> We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided we continue step by step until there is no turning back. (Junker again, on the general EU methodology)
> When people ask politicians today “What will become of Europe?” or “Where is European integration heading?”, we usually give an evasive answer. “We don’t want a super state” that is generally the first thing we say. I must admit that I have in the past often resorted to this kind of thing myself. (Viviane Reading, former vice president)
> We know that nine out of 10 people will not have read the Constitution and will vote on the basis of what politicians and journalists say. More than that, if the answer is No, the vote will probably have to be done again, because it absolutely has to be Yes. (Jean-Luc Dehaene, Former Belgian Prime Minister and Vice-President of the EU Convention)
> I have never understood why public opinion about European ideas should be taken into account. (Raymond Barre, former French Prime Minister)
There are endless quotes like these. You get a sense of the ideology found in the EU institutions by reading them. It's an ideology that never takes no for an answer, believes in its own manifest destiny and views the act of centralizing power as the central moral mission of their generation. So of course Chat Control is an unkillable zombie.
> "In a 52-48 referendum this would be unfinished business by a long way. If the Remain campaign win two-thirds to one-third that ends it."
- Nigel Farage (16 May 2016)
All the quotes are clearly talking about closer integration which no one is hiding is a stated goal of the European Union. It's right there in the original treaties `an ever closer union`. If you don't like it leave, but the rest have all committed to that a long time ago.
The chat control thing has nothing to do with all of the above, it's just a bit of legislation. The whole "we will vote on it again and again until we can finally push it through on the 12th of August at 03:00 o'clock with a total of 20 votes" is a typical strategy seen in many democracies pushed by vested interests on unpopular legislation.
It's not the "EU" that wants this to pass, there are specific people and groups pushing for this surveillance state apparatchiks, all sort of compliance industry vultures, and all the censorship technology industry that is dying to enter the chat market.
I really doubt von der Leyen or anyone in a position of actual power actually cares about this, I am certain they really think this is small time inconsequential bullshit. They have much larger problems to deal with, like the looming jet and diesel shortage, the upcoming crop shortfall we are going to see come harvest season, getting Mercosur through, planning for when Trump inevitably invades Cuba or puts Greenland back on the menu.
No, people didn't commit to it. That is pretty much the core of the criticism. It will never be a federation and while economic integration is worthwhile, it should be reduced to very clear boundaries.
> I really doubt von der Leyen or anyone in a position of actual power actually cares about this, I am certain they really think this is small time inconsequential bullshit.
And yet it just keeps showing up over and over and over again, no matter how many times it's voted down. Someone with no actual power must really not care about this at all.
>All the quotes are clearly talking about closer integration
Are you saying "the ends justify the means" of this "closer integration"? With that logic, Hitler's end goal was also closer integration of Europe's countries once he conquered them all.
>If you don't like it leave
Impossible to leave now when you joined 20+ years ago, when the EU was something completely different, which now grew beyond what you signed up for, without fucking your economy. It's called a rug pull with a dead man's switch. Try to leave and we make sure we all blow up.
>They have much larger problems to deal with, like [...] planning for when Trump inevitably invades Cuba
Why is Cuba a bigger issue for Ursula than what's happening in the EU? LAst time I checked Cuba is on a different continent and an insignificant trading partner of the EU.
> Impossible to leave now when you joined 20+ years ago, when the EU was something completely different, which now grew beyond what you signed up for, without fucking your economy. It's called a rug pull with a dead man's switch. Try to leave and we make sure we all blow up.
The EU was always designed to be an "ever closer union". It's literally in the Treaty of Rome from 1957 (!). This is explicitly what was signed up for. It's going a bit slow, unfortunately, but it is the core point. There's no rug being pulled. This was always the goal. It is specifically what everyone signed on to.
>The EU was always designed to be an "ever closer union".
Wow, isn't it convenient that such a vague all-encompassing paper from the past that you never voted for, can be used a justification for anything being done to you today?
What are the boundaries for that "ever closer union"? At which point it it just close enough? Or is it open ended? Would you sign an open ended contract with the bank? That wouldn't be legal.
>It's literally in the Treaty of Rome from 1957 (!)
How many Europeans alive today voted for that in 1957? Were they aware when they signed it of what it would lead to or were they duped into signing something so vague and all-encompassing that will be used to do anything against them in the future?
>This is explicitly what was signed up for.
That's the problem, it's vague and not explicit at all.
> This was always the goal.
Really? In 1957 people back then already knew that in the future they would cede their national sovereignty to a unelected bureaucrat in Brussels who would make decisions against their nation's best interest?
>It is specifically what everyone signed on to.
Who exactly is that "everyone"? I never voted for this. Neither did my parents.
There's no boundaries to "ever closer union". That's what ever closer means, definitionally.
Nobody was duped into anything, countries exercised their sovereignty to come to an agreement.
The rest of your concerns is just how literally any legislation and treaty ever works. When did you sign on to your country's constitution? What about the treaty of Bern establishing the Universal Postal Union in 1874?
Key concept here is legal succession.
>There's no boundaries to "ever closer union".
Ok, but you haven't told me what exactly the end goal of that "ever closer union" is. Aren't we already fully unified?
Nor have you disputed the vagueness of the "ever closer union" which is used to undemocratically bully countries in the union to do what unelected corrupt Brussels bureaucrats want them to do.
>Key concept here is legal succession.
Which is not set in stone.
"Ever" can never be fulfilled. That's what the word means.
> Aren't we already fully unified?
Clearly we are not fully unified. We still have 27 different budgets for example. We are still mostly borrowing as 27 different independent sovereigns for example.
> Ok, but you haven't told me what exactly the end goal of that "ever closer union" is.
That's what the legislative process of proposals, rejections and counter-proposals is all about figuring out what the end goal looks like, that's why we don't have an EU constitution and instead have the Treaty of Lisbon. The constitution was rejected in popular processes in France and the Netherlands withdrawn and an alternative proposal was made that actually made it into agreement.
You can frame that as they went around our back to do evil things. Or you know as a negotiation where both sides of an argument compromise. The key clue that this is a compromise between two sides is that no one is actually happy with the result.
> Are you saying "the ends justify the means" of this "closer integration"? With that logic, Hitler's end goal was also closer integration of Europe's countries once he conquered them all.
I am saying a closer union was what was agreed upon.
> Impossible to leave now when you joined 20+ years ago, when the EU was something completely different, which now grew beyond what you signed up for, without fucking your economy. It's called a rug pull with a dead man's switch. Try to leave and we make sure we all blow up.
The UK left 47 years after joining, it would be better off if they stayed in, but it has not been the end of the world. Also if your countrymen are pro further EU integration and you are against it, you can just leave.
> Why is Cuba a bigger issue for Ursula than what's happening in the EU? LAst time I checked Cuba is on a different continent and an insignificant trading partner of the EU.
Because god knows what is going to happen to American liquefied gas exports to the EU if they are fighting a war in the Caribbean.
>I am saying a closer union was what was agreed upon.
Again, that vague argument does not disprove my argument.
Does the end justify the means? Yes, or no? If yes, then what's the point of democracy and free will, if no, what's the point of the EU forcing its will on everyone?
>Also if your countrymen are pro further EU integration
What does "further EU integration" even mean? Being an even bigger bitch to clueless out of touch unelected bureaucrats in Brussels to deiced things in countries they can't find on the map, whose language they don't speak, whose economy and culture they don't understand?
> Impossible to leave now when you joined 20+ years ago, when the EU was something completely different, which now grew beyond what you signed up for, without fucking your economy. It's called a rug pull with a dead man's switch. Try to leave and we make sure we all blow up.
Translation: the benefits of being in the EU outweigh the drawbacks.
This is the crux of it. From your local parish council to the largest supranational organisation, nobody's going to be in favour of every decision made. They're still better than the alternative.
> Translation: the benefits of being in the EU outweigh the drawbacks.
Well, yes. But that WAS NOT what was voted upon. What was voted upon were specific proposals to change the EU and have closer integration.
The votes (there was more than one) had clear outcomes: "NO".
But in a democratic system that should be then of it! And it wasn't. But the truth is the EU has a very long history of overriding democratic votes, "for good reasons". Frankly, I even agree with the basic assessment there: that what the EU proposed was the best outcome and voters rejected it for bad reasons. But in a democracy that voters reject it is the final say.
And the problem with it is that if "rational" things can be forced through against the will of the voters ... it always ends the same way.
Ireland rejected. The treaty was modified to address the concerns of Irish voters. Ireland accepted.
"Ireland rejected, the treaty was modified, and the Irish government said 'despite your changes, we refuse to allow our electorate to revisit this'" doesn't sound like a better approach.
You're talking about the first big EU farce, the Nice Treaty. Btw: "Nice", as in the Roman city in the south of France with the excellent Carnaval, not the English word.
But then there was the second farce, the "EU constitution":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_establishing_a_Constitu...
Note how many referenda and votes were planned ... but suddenly canceled after voters started rejecting the treaty. And note how the page does not say how the replacement, the "Treay of Lisbon" was adopted. Sure they would vote on it, right? Otherwise, what credibility would they have left?
Well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Lisbon
Obviously there were no more votes on any EU future plans, with one exception.
I've worked for the EU Commission. Let me tell you: the bureaucrats there are angry about this. You see, the whole constitution was an attempt for the EU to become more democratic, gain credibility, by "sacrificing" power to voters. By the time the Treaty of Lisbon was created, the EU had lost power (much less than the constitution, but still some. Oh and they lost power to member states, NOT to voters), had "been forced" to push through the reforms anyway AND they had lost all credibility.
The only exception, the only vote on the EU's future? The Brexit vote ...
> Why is Cuba a bigger issue for Ursula than what's happening in the EU? LAst time I checked Cuba is on a different continent and an insignificant trading partner of the EU.
That's also because of unwarranted American sanctions.
Which for once isn't only Trump's fault, every American president has been happy to let the Cubans suffer for no reason.
https://youtu.be/jxWlJ_muK0I
Related.
Isn't that how politics works? People keep pushing for what they want until they get it.
No, moratoriums are a thing.
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America would be happy to bring you our brand of Democracy!
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.
The same Kutcher who had to step down because he supported a rapist who happened to be his friend.
Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore (no joke).
What's in there for these people to push for chat control of all things?
In other words, CIA.
You won't get such analysis because the EU law making process is (a) mostly secret and (b) doesn't necessarily follow the process laid out in the treaties, making a lot of discussion purely theoretical. This has been a problem for years. The British pushed back when they were members but no longer.
Five days ago:
https://euobserver.com/223533/the-european-unions-culture-of...
The EU is increasingly hiding things from journalists, researchers and members of civil society.
Secrecy has a long tradition in the EU, but the European Commission has clearly limited the publicity of its activities during Ursula von der Leyen’s second presidency.
The commission’s new Rules of Procedure significantly limit what counts as an official document. They authorise withholding and destroying information even after a request for access has been made. The commission has, on flimsy grounds, concealed legal documents and files related to the regulation of technology giants, among other things.
It is now almost impossible to monitor how the EU uses its power, for example, in relation to large platform companies.
The EU never improves. A decade ago the same complaints were being made:
https://euobserver.com/61985/secret-eu-law-making-takes-over...
Secret EU law making reached a high in 2016 that has only been matched once before, according to figures obtained by EUobserver.
The normal process starts with a bill from the European Commission. The bill is then channelled through the European Parliament and the Council of the EU, representing member states.
If no agreement is reached at first reading, a second reading is launched. But according to figures provided by the parliament, not a single bill ended up in a second reading agreement in 2016, only the second time this has happened since EU parliament record keeping began in 2004.
“That is quite astonishing, but it is just a continuation of a trend that we have been seeing for quite a while now,” said Vicky Marissen of Pact European Affairs, a Brussels-based consultancy specialising in EU decision-making procedures.
Second readings are important because they open up the debate to the public at large. Removing this phase means the details are being agreed behind closed doors and people have to rely on insider information to understand what is happening.
My current understanding is:
- First you get the idea, framework and influence from academic "centers", foundations and Think Tanks in the US.
- Then you have the lobbying from Big Tech and specialized firms (content scan, censorship, moderation and everything "compliance") from the US, France, Israel, etc.
- Last most of your politicians are largely interested in the system to be kept in place at any cost. So mass surveillance might be the difference between a comfy life and the pitchfork in medium or long term.
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...
For Americans, this process is called a trilogue. It is analogous to the White House a group of House and Senate members meeting in private to negotiate a bill, with most related documents being heavily redacted.
MEPs can pass the resulting deal or try to amend it. But amendments often mean the bill is pulled back into another trilogue rather than properly debated and rewritten in public.
The bill never gets debated, and the bill never gets rejected, so the commission can keep trying until it gets passed
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.
It’s important to understand this is not just a rando on the internet. This is a former Member of the European Parliament who has been criticising and sharing developments on Chat Control for years. The post isn’t made in a vacuum, but made with the knowledge of everything which has happened up to now, including the “Chat Control 2.0”, which is different from what’s happening now. Every concern you see there has been discussed at length on other posts on the same website.
Welcome to discussions on privacy on the internet :)
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
The right is a massive supporter for all of these authoritarian pushes, so what exactly are you trying to say?
Creating a problem, positioning yourself as the solution, and using any power you are given to exacerbate the problem, is an unfortunately-viable strategy. In theory, journalism can let the air out of the strategy, but someone's been going 'round killing or suborning the journalism organisations, so that's a bit tricky at the moment.
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.
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.
Perhaps you didn't see it that way.
However, I do remember the conversations from that time.
I still don't have any social media other than LinkedIn that connects to my identity, and warned family against it for as long as I could.
Saying people on HN were bamboozled is ludicrous. HN is an old bastions for people who argue for privacy and anonymity. I sincerely doubt (hope) that many people would say they were fooled. That would indicate a degree of intellectual immaturity and avoidance of concequence which makes any other position held suspect.
It was clear that there was no other way this was going to go. Saying the IPO tipped the scales is also being wildly generous to firms.
Perhaps its the other side of the coin of the HN zeitgeist? faith in firms matching the distrust in government.
Facebook was started by a college kid who made a site for non-consensually rating the faces of his fellow female classmates. He called his initial users "dumb f*cks" for trusting him with their private information. Information, which he offered to share with his friend, also without consent. It was obvious from the start that Facebook was up to no good, but money and power [1] prevailed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel#Facebook
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> 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.
> by virtue of not having any profiles and social media sites can tag you and form a shadow profile around you.
This can be done to you whether you have a profile or not. Having an actual profile likely means that you've signed onto some tos that allows them to add a lot more to your "shadow profile" and use it in more ways, and that any complaints about the treatment will go to forced arbitration.
Yeah, your family members will be more than happy to tag you once Facebook asks them who that person on a group photo is.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>this "scenario" which doesn't exist
Where do you get your information from, exactly? In criminal and intelligence circles, this is not exactly uncommon knowledge. I hope you never experience the horror of finding out that even in federal protective custody, that military intelligence is already there waiting for you.
>ways it cannot exist with nothing to with privacy,
In the Soviet Union, for example, all medical records were accessible by the state security services, and this served legitimate national security purposes. You have no idea what it's like to be targeted by an entity like the CIA.
>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!?!?
It would be a legitimate target, tbh there might not even be much of a point in terms of practical affect. Do you have any idea how many "crimes" have been reported to the international community, only to be ignored completely by all relevant propaganda outlets?
> insert actual agents into a hospital for illegal child surgery and escape notice.
Our propaganda outlets have literally reported on, swathes of, evidence of the CIA doing exactly this. Your country was not immune to this spookery.
I have some bad news for you. This is a real scenario, likely happening within a 1000km radius of you. Military usage of brain-computer interfaces go back over a century, the experience of being an intelligence asset is nothing like you assume. Many of the assets aren't even perceptual of their human experience in a manner expected naturally. The individuals who are aware of their status, at this point, learn to be silent very quickly.
Surgery based neurological compromise is only one example of the various operations currently running rampant in NATO countries.
>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.
And your intelligence agencies won't tell you shit, they will slap a "CLASSIFIED" label on it, and continue to enjoy their cushy positions while their people continue to be exploited.
>Why do you think you can secure this incredibly invasive theoretical network
I'm just one individual who has had the great misfortune of having to deal with this spookery first-hand. You can propose the design of this system if you wish.
> all evidence from our entire history to the contrary
I'm genuinely not trying to be rude, but this line is absolutely hilarious. Depending on the country you reside in, your intelligence agencies likely are well aware of the state of neurological (again, this is just one category) compromise in your country, and aren't telling you shit.
> This is such schizobabble that makes no sense
There's a reason HIPPA has exemptions for national security purposes, to the extent in which law matters when dealing with spookery (it does not, nobody follows the fucking "law" in these operations).
Just wait until you learn about how deeply compromised the CDC is.
It would be nice to at least have the illusion of transparency in regards to, very relevant data, such as what is happening to your citizens in public hospitals. Instead the US went the opposite direction, this is not a coincidence.
> that I don't know what else to do beyond urging you to seek some alternatives to wherever you got this from.
I have been imprisoned extra-judicially, threatened with torture (I complied quickly), and served rotten food on US soil. You don't have to believe me, and I sincerely hope you never experience the horror of realizing your jailers are already compromised, nor the experience of realizing that reporting any of this is literally fucking pointless because the entire national security reporting apparatus for civilians and much of the military is deeply compromised and utterly pointless.
The US is so deeply compromised that it's a joke. Your media is failing you spectacularly in this regard.
Yeah this reads like a psychotic episode, so let me try the short version.
> I have been imprisoned extra-judicially, threatened with torture (I complied quickly), and served rotten food on US soil.
Would you prefer these people to have access to all of your communications? Or would you like to be able to legally encrypt your messages?
To address your actual point:
>Would you prefer these people to have access to all of your communications? Or would you like to be able to legally encrypt your messages?
I'm saying the entire security model regarding electronics is completely irrelevant. The same entities who have compromised the US deeply have been operating since long before the personal computer, and even telecommunications broadly. I do not care about what is on my computer, when they can easily kidnap, poison, or bless me with any of the other fun systems military intelligence has to offer.
Your national security apparatus has __good reason__ to be gathering any intelligence it can. I'd gladly hand over any piece of data to any agency which requests it, or anybody else really. These computers are toys.
>Yeah this reads like a psychotic episode, so let me try the short version.
You made my day brighter by repeating this propaganda, thank you for that.
Anybody reading this who might be a little less indoctrinated, ask your favorite language model about the history of CIA black sites and specifically the CIA's involvement in deep-brain stimulation and similar technologies. This has been publicized for __decades__.
And then realize this propaganda is a tiny, tiny, tiny portion of the spookery that has been running amok in the United States for a little under a century at this point.
You have absolutely no clue just how badly the national security complex has failed it's citizens in the US, and NATO more broadly.
It's not just killing privacy though. Democracy is undermined here by big money.
Closely related, I think. Without privacy even demonstrating, a democratic right, becomes risky.
What 'big money' you have in mind in this very specific case?
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
Anna's Archive is not a single point of failure. It is a duplication effort of tens of other shadow libraries.
You cannot "upload" directly to Anna's Archive for example. It must appear on other sites like Libgen or Z-Library.
Downloads are served by different "partner" servers, almost no downloads come directly from Anna's Archive, they are all distributed around to other servers.
Almost the entire Anna's Archive datasets are available as torrents, which are intentionally to avoid a "single point of failure". [1]
If Anna's Archive shut down tomorrow, almost every single file would still be accessible, albeit in a slightly less convenient manner. The whole system is not flawless, the sheer size of the content is hard to handle, but its one of the best efforts in the space and calling Anna's Archive a single point of failure seems disingenuous to me. I recommend reading Anna's Archive FAQ's and Blogs for more information.
[0] https://annas-archive.gd/faq [1] https://annas-archive.gd/torrents
> 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.
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.
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.
>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.
Bot detection in the case where the activity is not human like e.g. spam, is quite easy to detect. But the problem here is that a foreign influence bot is not like that at all. It is designed to act like a human. And the areas that foreign bots attack are also political issues that the domestic population cares about, so you can't really filter by content either.
You could still mitigate this by blocking accounts that use VPN IPs or requiring invasive IDV for accounts, but isn't this sort of thing exactly the type of authoritarian user monitoring that we would like to avoid?
I don't really get you point about removing surveillance style ad tech. Wouldn't that just make it even harder to detect foreign influence accounts?
Following the earlier example of Xitter, there are loads of accounts that are obvious bots or foreign propaganda outfits to anybody who's been using the site for a while, complete with a reasonably good litmus test: whenever you suspect a post is from one of these, check the posting account's location. For me the accounts that raise internal red flags are almost always posting from SE Asia, somewhere in Africa, Russia, etc.
That means their content and profile quirks follow clear patterns that are not that difficult to distinguish. Xitter just has no financial or legal incentive to do so.
> I don't really get you point about removing surveillance style ad tech. Wouldn't that just make it even harder to detect foreign influence accounts?
The difference is the invasiveness of the data gathered and who it's given to. For bot/troll/propaganda mitigation, invasiveness is comparably minimal (survelliance advertising isolates marketable qualities such as race, orientation, religion, marital status, purchasing habits, etc; none of these are necessary for mitigation) and gathered data never needs to leave the possession of the social network.
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.
That, unlike other proposed solutions, would certainly work. The problem is that these political fracture points are there because of opposing interests between different groups in society. This can be easily solved in more authoritarian government structures by simply choosing a winner and a loser, but in democracy not so much.
And while I don't have any doubt in my mind that there are foreign entities working to exploit these fracture points, I am very skeptical that they are the main cause of problems here. We have seen such fracture points arise and cause political strife up to the point of civil wars many times throughout history without such foreign instigation.
No, most of these are due to corruption and populism, also lack of interest in solving real problems. It's pretty simple to understand.
Foreign entities (a particular one really) is a tool used by corrupt politicians in each country. Eventually your political field becomes "who is the biggest traitor" and then you're finished, fascism is the only direction this is headed towards. This is your real destination, very closely modeled after that one foreign entity you have in mind. It already went through all these phases.
Start by dismantling the mechanisms behind surveillance advertising.
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.
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...
There should be some mechanism to block these repeated attempts.
The machine is working exactly as intended.
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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.
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).
You can't restrain the power of the Council. The Council is the member states. What you're proposing would take power away from the member states and hand it to, who? People already think the EU is undemocratic, imagine after that.
The main problem is that people still do not understand how the EU works. They don't understand that almost everything comes from the direction the member states push from the Council.
And in fact, I think the member states like it that way, or why else wouldn't they educate people more?
> hand it to, who?
To the people.
There are many ways to restrain the Council that'd make the EU more democratic: enforce more/full transparency into the Council's decision-making, expand the powers of the Parliament (making the Council into the upper house basically), enforce the Spitzenkandidat method for appointing the EC President, allow referenda on major issues to bypass the Council.
None of these is perfect, but they would streamline the democratic processes within the EU by lessening the role of the Council as intermediary.
I agree that the Council themselves would never allow that however.
which speaks volumes about either EU overstepping it's bounds as an entity, or is severely lacking checks and balances.
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
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 with 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.
Abolishing the European Commission would be seen as an attack on the individual countries' sovereignty as it would give more power to the EU.
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.
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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.
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
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.
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.
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...
> 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).
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.
> 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.
That's not what I'm doing. I'm pointing out some of the benefits of the EU, and I'm sure you've seen that this was not the only benefit I listed. Of course the influence of lobbying is still bad, and the EU should take steps to fix that.
I'm just pointing out that "an organisation something does something bad, therefore it shouldn't exist at all" is a bad argument that ignores the good it does.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Frequently it is exactly the same item from aliexpress or from local reseller. Depends for different types of course.
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.
I meant it like a retailer can buy it without the charge in bulk with a discount, but since the consumers can't, the retailer can increase the price. So the consumer pays more because of a middleman charging the difference.
Ideally there is enough competition between retailers, but obviously that is not true if the consumers are buying from china in the first place.
Instead of adding a fee, you should make the bulk imported item cheaper. If you can't compete then something is wrong, maybe something in single import being subsidized like air mail? If it's not then it's a more efficient system.
And I'm strictly talking about exact same products produced in china, not equivalent products of worse quality.
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.
> 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 €.
It is, because (one of) the big problem(s) is people impulse buying individual cheap things in large numbers, taking advantage of free shipping when the shipping is obviously not free. These stores exploit the fact that international postage and customs agreements were never written with a giant volume of small parcels in mind, making it artificially cheap (for the sender) to spam the system with them.
When Trump introduced tariffs everyone screamed but now the EU does EXACTLY the same and suddenly it's okay.
Exactly? I find it very different.
> 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.
What have the Romans ever done for us?
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.
If we agree that politicians are removed from democratic process then there is really no democratic process at all.
The EU is going to have to accept this increase in anti-EU sentiment, it will only ever increase as long as the EU has the democratic deficit that it has. It is what's both permitting this overreach, and the powerlessness to do something about it is what is breeding the anti-EU sentiment.
The problem begins and ends with the fact that there is just no realistic way to hold these people accountable. I don't know what it would take for people, across the EU, to consider punishing EU politicians to be more important than selecting their national government. A genocide, maybe? Something of that severity, no doubt. Certainly not something as pesky as instating a digital Stasi.
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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.
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.
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
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.
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Delta Chat does that but it's a bit janky.
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
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
I love the Freedom loving Free and democratic European Union!!!!!
Most people in EU
Also those peopleA 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.
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.
how are modern riots being organized on a massive scale? I'm curious
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?
Would love to see some statistics on that.
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?
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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.
Yes, however there is history with this:
- EU-US Passenger Name Record Agreement: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/eu-us-agr...
- EU PNR Directive 2016/681: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2016/681/oj/eng
- EU-US SWIFT / Terrorist Finance Tracking Program Agreement: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE...
- EU Data Retention Directive 2006/24/EC: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex:62...
China, Russia, and friends will provide digital escape hatches for Western cititizens and vice versa it seems
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.
EU became a thing in 1993. And soon after Europe could not keep up with US of A anymore. Even though USSR was gone, EU expanded and so on. Coincidence?
Denmark is a world leading producer of windmills
Meanwhile local solar industry is loosing to Chinese at fast pace. Batteries industry ain’t looking good either.
The point was the conflict of interest. But yes what you said could maybe even make the conflict even more pronounced
IMO it's conflict of interest of some short-sighted naive idealists vs people who want to get stuff done.
For example, solar. Shit ton of euromoneys is poured into subsidies. But those subsidies are not geofenced. Thus vast majority of people go for chinese stuff. It could have been much better to subsidise locally produced components only. Then price would be +/- the same.
Now chinese components are dirt cheap with all the subsidies. I myself went for chinese components, because break-even period was like 5 vs 10 years. I'll just pihole the inverter from calling home once I figure out how to get some statistics without the manufacturer's app.
I guess some people decided it's better to get 2-3x more solar installed power ASAP rather than prop up the local solar industry.
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.
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.
https://privatecitizen.press/episode/160/
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.
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
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
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 would also sterilize indigenous Greenland population and immigrants back in the 1950s-1960s. THey have a dark side few people know about.
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.
Yeah they are really racist, sorry but I have no other way of putting it. They even have a law where they can evict and destroy a building when there's "too many" non-western immigrants living there. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/18/denmark-ghetto...
Hungary is often called out as a black sheep but Denmark is a wolf in sheep's clothes.
They saw Sweeden and freaked out, Denmark being already a nanny state.
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.
I think it's a more useful analysis to add a second dimension than to try to project everything onto 'left' and 'right' (in the style of the .
Axis 1 - civil & political rights: In favour of broad social & political rights (down) -> In favour of few social and political rights a.k.a. authoritarianism (up) Axis 2 - economy: In favour of social responsibility / society ensuring people's needs are met (in the sense of 'from each according to ability, and to each according to need') (left) -> In favour of individual responsibility and a laissez faire economic freedoms (right).
On this 2d view, Social Democrats are nominally lower left, while Chat Control is an authoritarian policy (i.e. appealing to anyone on the top half of the coordinate system), so it would run counter to their nominal values.
Note that there is a significant number of the economic left who are nominally authoritarian (see for example Stalinist / Maoists), and likewise for the right so it doesn't make sense to project that as a left/right thing.
That helps slightly, and this version is often favored by libertarians, but I prefer the “8 values” or 8 dimension test that also looks at diplomatic, technological, and religious dimensions. I think I’ve also seen a 9 dimension version.
A multifactor values-based approach better maps niche positions and explains why there are often irreconcilable disagreements among large blocs that are otherwise compatible. For instance, there will always be recurring tensions between progressives and leftcoms despite their neighboring positions on the 4-quadrant political compass. And right-wing secular monarchists don’t really get along with theocrats either.
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.
>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?
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.
Which country are you referring to?
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)
Well I have gotten the feeling that MEPs are those that do not make it on country level... Still, doesn't mean that they don't in general follow what their own political parties want.
Which is why the whole idea of political parties is the main travesty of the fake democracy they promote to enforce their own goals over population.
> 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.
Yep, that. Sorry, growing up in Poland I know the amount of horrors the EU _prevented_.
Europe without EU isn’t democracy, it’s a bunch of fiefdoms.
> 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...
> That couldn't be further from the truth.
All the referendums I can recall (French and Dutch in 00s, Italian recently, Greek and British) were all resounding “No”’s… plus the rise of the far right is kinda hard to miss…
> Gallup, March 2025: No country approves of their own leadership, or that of U.S., over the EU [2]
That’s literally insane. I don’t believe it. I have yet to find someone who is fond of the EU leadership. lol. …
>Peace in Europe.
That peace in Europe didn't start because of the EU, it started because western Europe was conquered by the US and eastern Europe by USSR so they were a bit too incapacitated to fight each other under those conditions and given the much bigger issues they had at the time.
I didn't say it started because of the EU. It lasted because of it. See the Schuman declaration I quoted below.
Peace between EU countries was stable even before the formation of the modern EU.
Before the formation of the European Coal & Steel community, the direct predecessor to the EU, we literally had a millenium of non-stop slaughter.
Yes, and the European Coal & Steel community didn't stop the slaughter, the nuclear powered US stopped did. The stopped slaughtering wouldn't have continued without the EU. Everyone in Europa couldn't have kept doing it even if they wanted to with 80 US military based on the continent.
You give the EU too much credit for peace. In fact, there's way more tensions between EU countries now as EU members than in the past. Poland even went to buy weapons from Korea and build them on-shore because they don't trust buying weapons from France and Germany. Just because EU countries aren't slaughtering each other, doesn't mean they like or trust each other.
You can say what you want, but take any history book and you will see that what we got now is the longest period in history without a war between European countries. They don't fully trust each other? OK, but this is still a great improvement over the past.
> the longest period in history without a war between European countries.
Yes, THanks to the US military occupation
> What good did the EU bring
The EU is pushing the member countries e.g. regarding climate change. Not that it is enough, but it is something.
Also the EU tries to do some privacy stuff, antitrust (when it doesn't get bullied by the US), etc.
I feel like ChatControl is really about some lobbyists making a lot of noise and politicians not competent to understand how cryptography works. People say "that's because the ruling class wants surveillance over the citizens", but I believe it's incompetence. Just like the "ruling class" doesn't want to screw humanity by not addressing climate change and the current mass extinction: they are just not competent enough to understand the problem.
And that's the reflection of the people who elect them. Go in the street and ask random people what they understand about E2EE. In good approximation, they have no idea how it works. Worse: they don't give a damn. How would they elect people who are competent about it?
Not the OP but yeah this would give me a huge punch in the face and seriously undermine my trust in and support of the EU forever.
Is it enough to turn me anti-EU? I don't know yet. But I certainly would be on the fence instead of a proponent as I am now.
The current age verification laws are already pushing me in that direction and also the weakening of GDPR and DMA/DSA under American pressure.
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.
I never meant this. You should read my comment in the context of the discussion. And I'm also explicitly saying that the EU needs improvement.
> 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
I also see more of these, but I'd say still around half require more click for "reject non-essential"
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.
The largest Dutch tech website doesn’t adhere to the cookie law. They ever reported about websites not adhering to the law while not adhering to the law themselves.
"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.
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.
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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.
You mean 96% click do not allow and go through https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/96-of-us-users-opt-o...
> This could be solved on the client side
GDPR legally prohibits tracking in general, not cookies specifically. Advertisers use fingerprinting more than cookies these days already, even if browsers removed cookie support altogether it wouldn't change anything.
> 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.
Opting out of cookies does not mean no tracking. Tracking companies moved away from cookies a decade ago and now fingerprint the browser through JS in very subtle ways.
And the banners are not about cookies specifically, they are about tracking. It's illegal to track people without a lawful reason (and one of the valid reasons is user consent).
What are you supposed to learn from the banner anyway? It's just an additional annoyance.
You should just assume that anything that your browser exposed may be used to track you. The real problem is that most browsers and browser configurations are far too permissive for the sake of avoiding breakage. The real technical solution to online tracking is standardization of browser attributes so that users look identical, and only allowing for very limited and coarse measurement of client-side user interaction.
> The real technical solution to online tracking is standardization of browser attributes so that users look identical
As long as the web is an applications platform rather a hypertext document platform there will always be enough small differences to fingerprint. There is never going to be a technical solution, the solution is going to have to be social (legal, e.g. the GDPR).
But the GDPR does not achieve anything in practice. You get annoying cookie/tracking banners that you are effectively forced to accept in order to use the website, and companies keep collecting data. They promise not to misuse the data, but we all know that they still will. Enforcement is very difficult because it is impossible to audit every tech firm out there, so you are essentially relying on leaks and whistleblowers for the truth to come out. A complete ban on data collection not directly provided by the user would have been more effective overall, even though you still face the same enforcement issue.
And the banners are not about cookies specifically, they are about tracking. It's illegal to track people without consent.
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.
> 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.
The problem is that's not what anybody, including the users, want. Nobody cares that browsers have cookies as an implementation detail. It's a ridiculous thing to use as the basis of a privacy rule. Does the user care that the site uses cookies to implement a shopping cart feature? Does the user not care that the site is tracking them without cookies using device fingerprinting? Cookies were never the problem.
On top of that, they were the thing the users already had control over. Browsers allow you to delete or reject cookies, provide private browsing modes that don't submit them, etc.
Meanwhile the things that would actually be useful, like prohibiting services from requiring the user to provide a phone number (a de facto cross-service cross-device tracking ID) in order use the service, or requiring device attestation (which uniquely identifies the device), are left unaddressed.
I am eagerly awaiting your grassroots campaign to define legislation that would tackle such uses, and also eagerly awaiting it backfiring because of malicious compliance.
Malicious compliance is a result of incompetent drafting. It's common because incompetent drafting is common, case in point GDPR. It's definitely possible to screw it up less than that -- there are many laws that nobody complains about.
You pass a law prohibiting any entity from conditioning the use of their service on the user providing them with a phone number. Even services that actually use SMS or voice calls are required to provide an alternative like email or the web with no reduction in functionality and for no additional cost.
You pass a law stating that any device which is sold or leased to anyone who takes physical possession of it cannot contain a private key the customer is unable to both read and extricate at no cost.
What does malicious compliance look like there? Anyone can give them an email instead of a phone number and if that doesn't work they're in violation. Remote attestation is the only reason for devices to come from the factory containing an inaccessible private key, which is thereby prohibited and unable to be used as a tracking ID.
Cookies are not the basis of the law, which is about tracking in general, abstracted from the exact means and implementation details.
The law contains some ridiculous language about storing data on the user's device, which applies to cookies in particular even though that category in general makes no coherent sense, because the thing that should matter is if you can identify the user/device, not whether you used something in the shape of a cookie to do it.
> 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.
> 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.
All of those are either illegal already (scams) or easily avoidable without regulation.
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.
I agree that governments could be better at monopoly busting and that a wide variety of choice is better (here in Belgium there are enough different parties (the Greens, the Socialists, the Labour Party, the Christian Democrats, the Liberals, some right wing parties,...) that it seems to work okay, but I gather that elsewhere there's a dearth of choice).
The biggest problem with 'voting with my wallet' is that it means we get the bad old democracy back: the poor don't get to vote, the rich get to vote more. That may have been good enough a few centuries ago, but nowadays we have universal suffrage and I think we can all agree that's better. I know in the USA there's been some back and forth about it regarding voter ID laws (getting an ID costs money so it penalizes the poor) and the fact that people who can only vote by going to the poll office may get penalized by their employers (who can dock wages for the time the employee spent not working); but technically there is universal suffrage and it's better than what came before.
> The biggest problem with 'voting with my wallet' is that it means we get the bad old democracy back: the poor don't get to vote, the rich get to vote more.
The thing about "vote with your wallet" is that it's not actually a tabulation. Poor people wouldn't get a "vote" as to which yacht companies succeed or fail because they don't buy yachts, but for the same reason, why should they then care anything about yacht companies?
Conversely, the ordinary person still buys necessities, and at scale buys them in larger numbers than rich people do, because the majority of people aren't rich. So the companies making the things ordinary people actually buy do have to be responsive to them.
> I know in the USA there's been some back and forth about it regarding voter ID laws (getting an ID costs money so it penalizes the poor) and the fact that people who can only vote by going to the poll office may get penalized by their employers (who can dock wages for the time the employee spent not working)
The whole thing is so dumb. Just require ID to vote and then don't charge any fees to get an ID. Just open the polls at 8PM the eve of election day and keep them open a full contiguous 24 hours so that nobody has to come during work hours regardless of what shift they work.
> but technically there is universal suffrage and it's better than what came before.
"Technically" seems to be doing a lot of work there, because the actual problems have nothing to do with people not being able to get off work to vote.
The main one is that you have a ballot with a small, finite number of viable candidates and none of them represent your interests. In many cases they all have the same position on a particular issue and that position is different from yours. Even when their positions differ, the ones you agree with don't align.
Candidate A supports zoning reform and opposes alternative energy, Candidate B opposes zoning reform and supports alternative energy, you want both zoning reform and alternative energy, therefore you're screwed into flipping a coin. And so is everyone else, which means the politicians don't actually have to do what anybody wants because most of the votes are people who didn't like any of the candidates holding their nose to choose the one they think is the lesser evil, only to have their vote canceled out by someone who 90% agrees with them on everything but came out the other way on the coin flip.
> refuse to learn from falling behind the US economically
The EU economy has been slowing down since 2007, the peak production of conventional oil. The US is still producing oil, which is why the US economy is better.
People love to think that they are richer or more successful because they are smarter. The fact is that the economy goes up when there is an abundance of energy, period.
So there is nothing to learn from falling behind the US economically, other than "the EU needs to adapt to the reality of its economy measurably slowing down". And following the US and their lack of regulations and tendency towards a fascist economy (with BigTech working together with the ruling class) is not the right direction, IMO.
> I see a lot of pro-EU content on this site when they're terrible on both tech and entrepreneurship.
Tech and entrepreneurs usually want to become rich by producing more. The best places to do that are where the is money, which is where the economy grows, which is where there is an abundance of cheap fossil fuels.
Entrepreneurs usually say "remove the regulations and our economy will grow again", but what they mean, really, is "remove the regulations and I will get rich, because I am on the side of those who would benefit from it".
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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.
We French still get higher life expectancy, more free time, free education and healthcare... GDP per Capita is a terrible metric.
Not claiming that everything's sunshine and rainbows over here, but at least we aren't ruled by a proto fascist pedo actively ridding the country of its democratic institutions and destroying public service after public service to give more wealth to his pedo friends.
Most of the GDP per capita divergence has happened since 2008. My same comment could’ve been written when Biden was president.
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The US is also falling behind Chinese manufacturing. They had to ban Chinese cars because legacy American automakers couldn't compete.
China just recently had to ban their own companies from selling cars below cost.
It's not a clear win for China, their car companies are struggling.
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> 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.
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Didn't we just have a round of people being fired and arrested in the US for saying mean things about Charlie Kirk?
And at least people are not shot in the streets by the police for protesting...
Dutch police shot at a child during protests.
With video:
https://nos.nl/artikel/2435671-beschoten-boerenzoon-ik-wil-v...
Shots during COVID protests:
https://nos.nl/video/2406436-terugkijken-zo-werden-rotterdam...
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
I meant the policemen of course. They were never tried for manslaughter or even fired(?). So at least in this case the lack of accountability is similar what is regularly happening in the US.
The IOPC is still investigating the police officers involved.
They won't release their findings until September, so it's too early to say that there's no accountability.
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.
as long as your mean memes aren't against the POTUS ;)
> 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.
Europe is over all far more democratic and safer then USA. Including people actually being safer when they speak.
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.
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
Agreed, but there's always the possibility of a referendum or even an initiative, to oversteer a decision of the representatives, given enough supporters.
>> 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.
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 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.
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.
That's not true. You are allowed to have a prioprietary/custom connector, you just have to provide USB-C option as a fallback.
> you just have to provide USB-C option as a fallback.
Given you must have a USB-C port, the design would still be limited by the USB-C form factor and adding another port would even further increase the complexity, costs and weight of the design. This will still strongly limit the spread of new designs, and I'm pretty sure it's effectively equivalent to mandating just USB-C for smaller devices.
I see how this could be an issue for small devices, but this wouldn't stop a company from testing a new connector on bigger ones: laptops still have one or more USB-A ports, despite USB-C being common now. So having an additional connector other than USB-C isn't an issue.
The point is, if the regulation works as intended, it consolidates USB-C as the standard and slows or blocks new types of ports from being designed and tested. If it doesn't, then it's useless. You can't have it both ways.
Imagine a company that wants to design the next type of port. Normally, it would just do R&D and engineer the product, then put it on the market with that type of port. If the device only has that type of port, people must use it and provide feedback by choosing to keep buying the product (maybe they'll also make it explicit that they like the new port). If this phase is successful and the company opens the specs and other companies adopt it, it might become a de facto standard.
Now consider doing it with the current regulation. You need to do R&D, but the design will require higher costs because you have to make the device work with the old USB-C, too.
Maybe it's not a high cost for the company, so they do it anyway. People might use the port much less because some may not even try the new port and stick to the USB-C for simplicity, or because they are accustomed to it.
So the company won't have the same strong feedback. But let's assume they manage to make most users happy to use the new one because it's so much better. Now they open the standard. Other companies have to pay the additional engineering costs to add the other port. Some might be able to afford it just fine, while others might not want to add the complexity and costs of two ports.
Let's say, however, it spreads anyway. Now you hope the EU will accept it as a new standard so you can ditch the now-old USB-C standard. But the EU might just say "NO". It's very hard to predict if the government would be happy with it.
Given the compounding of these effects, the result is most likely that the company won't even think about wanting to develop the next standard.
The probability of a new standard happening is much reduced. And as I said before, if it weren't reduced, then the regulation would be useless to begin with, as people would use and test different connectors regardless of the USB-C support.
As I said in the root comment, I don't care too much about the connectors not evolving, but it just goes to show that people don't realise that there is no free lunch. Add constraints, and you add costs and slow down progress.
You can't force companies to add value with no costs, and value is also subjective, so the government often doesn't know what is valuable to people. At most, the government might know what some people say is valuable to them. But this is not the same thing.
Very few people would have said smartphones were the future, and they would buy one in 2007. Democracy is a very bad way for economic and technological progress to happen - unless it's for some military technology for which the government is the only customer.
> it consolidates USB-C as the standard
Yes
> slows or blocks new types of ports from being designed and tested
No
> If the device only has that type of port, people must use it and provide feedback by choosing to keep buying the product (maybe they'll also make it explicit that they like the new port)
When getting something out on the market, they woudn't take this risk and still have a commonly used port on the side. The consumers as well would prefer to not take the risk of buing a device forcing them to use a port no other device is using.
> So the company won't have the same strong feedback
For the above reason, in the situation you describe, the feedback wouldn't be worth much, or at most it would be as worth as the situation with a more common port on the side. In one case, customers may refrain from buying the device with only the new port, because there isn't a wide market of accessories using that port yet (and not because they don't like it). In the other, the signal could be weak as consumers could just ignore the new port and keep buying the device due to the old port still being there.
I apologize, but I only skimmed the rest of your comment, because I believe it rests on a flawed premise in the first line.
> When getting something out on the market, they woudn't take this risk and still have a commonly used port on the side. The consumers as well would prefer to not take the risk of buing a device forcing them to use a port no other device is using.
Like, people didn't buy Apple products before they were forced to use USB-C? So why did Apple not want to use USB-C if that caused them to lose money and sell fewer phones? Also, if this were true, once most devices support USB-C (like they already did before the regulation), the standard would be self-enforcing and require no additional regulation.
> I apologize, but I only skimmed the rest of your comment, because I believe it rests on a flawed premise in the first line.
Given your statements contradict historical facts, I'd probably think a bit more before concluding that.
> 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.
That's a good example of the mindset that is turning the EU into a backwater. Paraphrased you're saying there's no problem with the EU banning new technologies because the Americans can always be relied on to make progress anyway, and then Europe can just copy whatever they do.
So there seems to be some confusion over premises in this thread.
The people pointing out the USB-C law as a failure are reasoning from the Golden Rule: what would happen if everyone did this? Nobody would design new connectors because of the catch-22 the law creates. You can't know what the next new connector should be without a competitive market, but governments have ended such a market. Also, to invest in a new technology requires a belief that you can actually launch it and gain profit by outcompeting other technologies, but government mandated monopolies prevent that, so there's just no incentive to do the work anymore.
The people arguing the USB-C law is fine are reasoning from a different and totally local perspective: why shouldn't we implement a command economy in Europe when we'll get the benefits of a free market economy by importing US goods anyway? They assume new tech will be developed for the US market and then all the EU has to do is have a committee that approves it.
The problem with this idea, beyond it being just pathetic, is there's no reason the US has to sell to Europe and the more annoying the EU makes trade the fewer technologies will be available for import. It's already common that new US tech products either don't launch in Europe or launch much later. Now frontier models are being restricted and not made available to European companies, that will make them fall even further behind. And we can assume that when a new connector is designed that's better than USB-C products designed around it will launch everywhere except Europe for a while, as only some products will have enough sales to justify an EU specific variant. So Europeans will eventually get used to not being able to acquire many products at home because import is blocked by the EU.
What's interesting to me is that this is a bit like how the USSR worked.
They were relying on the West for high-tech tractors and even to build factories (I know Ford helped them build some factories for a part of the factory output). I also know they used to look at the allocation of goods in the US as a starting point to decide what to produce, as they were basically running blind to what people needed or wanted.
Mikhail Gorbachev: "The EU is the old Soviet Union dressed in Western clothes."
> if I wanted to buy a device with a new type of connector, I should have been able to
You are. Nothing prevents the manufacturers to support other better charging solutions than USB-C. In fact many notebooks has their proprietary connectors and some smartphones use custom signaling over custom USB cable to provide better experience while complying with the regulation and support USB-C charging, too.
I replied to a similar question here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48711705.
If I wanted to buy a device with a different type of connector, including a different form factor or a totally different charging mechanism, I should be able to do so without additional costs or additional holes drilled in the case of the device.
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.
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...
why have we not heard more of a pushback from business and legal entities regarding privileged communication / protection of trade secrets?
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.
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 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..
Maybe the EU can work together with Russia on the Max messenger
And as always, the only people who will bother will be the few% who are involved in some sort of illegal activity.
Or automatically suspected.
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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.
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.
That might be true, but does not contradict the parent: if the design of the EU overall allows this to happen, it is indeed very undemocratic. How does the fact that the EP rejected it (multiple times), help the population of the EU states, that never pushed for this? Even worse: your argument implies, that the EU is enabling national politicians to push through unpopolar decisions, that likely would have no chance on a purely national stage.
The national governments are elected.
People just tend to pay a lot less attention to how their national governments act on the EU.
The solution is not to throw the EU away, it is a massive good for all countries involved, it is to fucking hold your national governments accountable, and to demand more direct participation in the EU.
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.
That is one gigant If indeed.
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RIP all of the open source European software initiatives.
There is nothing redeemable about this union anymore.
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?!