EU Chat Control Bill Postponed

Some stuff the EU does is really good, like the GDPR, the right to be forgotten, the right to repair (smartphones with replaceable batteries and standard USB connectors). I don't even think it kills innovation. It just makes sure it is aligned with society.

But at the same time they do things like this....

It could easily close most security issues by regulating data collection. That would seriously reduce the damage of possible data leaks. Any encrypted content is only safe for a limited amount of time. This hasn't changed for ages.

Unfortunately governments in general and the EU in particular have a poor track record of making helpful regulations for businesses operating in STEM fields. Not many politicians have a STEM background themselves and not many have much experience of smaller businesses or grass roots volunteer work beyond a quick photo op. A field like software where a single individual can make a disproportionate contribution and where a lot of the FOSS we depend on every day was written at least partially by volunteers is probably quite alien to them.

Until the politicians are better educated the overall state of regulation will continue to be poor. Unfortunately until the small businesses and the FOSS world can speak at the same volume as corporate lobbyists and PR firms with multimillion budgets the politicians will probably continue to be poorly informed. In most places we have nothing like that level of coordination among the smaller players yet.

The results say otherwise. One way or another Europe killed off its tech companies and it's now entirely reliant on foreign companies for almost all IT services.

It's not a trope because they've already succeeded. You can't look at the EU where almost every IT service they use is made by a foreign company and say call it flourishing.

>But to my mind, unregulated everything is a nightmare.

Everything, like making food for your kids? Breathing air?

In the permission less school of thought, you don't need permission to use an existing API or data to do whatever you want as long as it isn't abusing the service or illegal.

In a permission full school of thought, you should always ask permission, from the authorities and whoever might have a vested interesting what you are doing.

It seems that in Europe it is far more common that many (most?) people expect you to get permission before you go off writing your random programs and putting them live on the Internet.

Where as in some other countries, people view pushing half baked ideas live as virtuous and artists manifest destiny and/or a existentially important economic function of startups.

When people from different cultures interact and they have completely different unspoken assumptions it can result in misunderstandings. In my case, the correct thing to do was apologize for the misunderstanding (definitely not arguing, you would never convince them to change their core cultural values!), and then not use the specific service or company involved (that had intractable permission issues due to any member being able to deny permission), and just work with other services that had no built in conflicts with the fundamental purpose of their service. (Organization names and the services involved redacted for courtesy.)

I read it as this: In effect, if you make money of the software you destribute you are responsible to address security issues

I hope that this is a change for the better. Now everyone who piggy-backed on some OSS project so far has to either maintain a fork (-> more contributions) or provide incentive for the dev to fix it (money?)

Remember when we used to do things because they were hard instead of falling back on lazy cynicism and convenience of status quo?

The U.S. seems stuck with the two party system primarily due to the mathematics of the Electoral College and lack of ranked choice voting. These require changes at the state level, not federal.

16 states and DC have now opted out of the Electoral College (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...). RCV is now in place for state-wide elections in Maine and Alaska, but recently banned (seemingly as a partisan protectionist measure) in Florida, Tennessee, South Dakota, Montana, and Idaho.

Gerrymandering and lack of a mixed electoral system also seem major factors for the political duopoly, with less clear solutions to me.

Also, the more constituents, the more difficult it is for third-party candidates to run and meaningfully affect the debate.

In the end, continent-sized superpower government is really hard. Even in the "good old days", you often ended up with people like Nixon.

In 1900 Congress had 357 representatives for a population of 76 million.

Today Congress has 435 representatives for a population of 331 million.

No, you didn't get what I wrote, the sentence you quoted starts with 'And so they convince themselves'. Whether it is true or not has no bearing on it.

For years now, the people who tried to say that the EU in its current form is not working have been silenced by the media or labelled as conspiracy nuts.

The people answered and the government of France should have listened, instead they came back with this treaty, changed a few tidbits and called it a day.

It was a slap in the face of democracy that was denounced by the right as well as by the left.

To say that this is a complex topic, so surely people don't know how to make up their mind because they may confuse the issue at hand with something else is laughable.

In a presidential campaign, it is perfectly valid to vote for someone because they speak well, wear nice clothes, say the right thing, or promise anything under the sun.

But a referendum should only be valid if people voted only for the question at hand and nothing else? That's very disingenuous.

If a government triggers a referendum and people vote no either because they don't like the proposal or because they don't like the party/government that brings the proposal forward, then this vote is as valid as any.

But then you only have indirect democratic legitimacy at best.

> Complex situations like this can't just be reduced to a yes/no decision.

Perhaps. Usually it should be retried. But you cannot just turn around and say you suddenly have legitimacy because the executive of a government once thought to ratify a constitution.

You also cannot just say voters were misinformed. Perhaps you are misinformed? This just displays a concerning understanding of democracy. To me that was the propaganda of that specific time in which they needed to ratify something without popular support, against democracy in that case.

This is Chat Control 2.0, the first bill did not make it through so now they come back with this new iteration. If this one doesn't pass , they'll come back with Chat control 3.0 and so on by next year or the one after.

I think it's very easy to take the benefits of the EU and our resulting prosperity for granted. We need to actually have some power in the US-EU relationship, and the only way is to combine further.

I don't know what that will look like, but I'd like Europe to be able to chart its own course. We know what happens to nations that are at the mercy of countries more powerful.

The main problems I see on the EU is that it is not integrated enough. There's a lot of bureaucracy that could be optimized if some things were more centralized (e.g.: labor laws, defense spending, etc).

Right now it is actually the council of the EU that is preventing the law from progressing.

I think the Council of Ministers also comes into the process. The Council consists of the national government ministers whose purview includes the matter at hand; it's membership changes for each meeting. It's really just all the member governments of the EU, one nation one council-member.

It turns out that in France the MPs who could do that are from the far right and that is why I asked the question above.