EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors
patrick-breyer.de
patrick-breyer.de
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.
Exactly. That time is mostly over.
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.
Why do we even need providers? Locally store the convos on each device and there's not a need for the server.
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?
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.
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.
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.
That is very, very different from mass surveillance.
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.
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.
The problem is that politicians were corrupted by power.
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.
Files?
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.
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.
Obviously I agree with all your other points.
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.
Otherwise agreed.
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.
And that's the issue with all bad laws. They have to approve it once. We have to fight against indefinitely…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- Nigel Farage (16 May 2016)
Related.
>European Commission's Metsola Overrides MEPs to Force Through Chat Control
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48657675 (45 comments)
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.
- 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.
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...
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
Feels like I grew up in a golden age and subsequent generations won't care because they never knew a different world
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
What is legal and what is right very rarely went together, so rather poor argument.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
To point: I don't accept the premise that the governments gets to decide which information I should be allowed to consume.
>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.
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.
Let's just ban those politicians, ban and censor "bad" media and platforms, and surveil all citizens to protect us from those pesky authoritarians!
no.
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.
Look up e. g. Hüseyin Doğru.
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.
I was trying to setup this Mac with NO iCloud account thus it could not deduct my age from the account.
It seems to be mostly bad individuals, or just individuals with some bad ideas they refuse to give up.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
That seems to always be "forgotten" about how the internet is acting as a accelerationist far right platform.
Without the EU, this would have been introduced in some member countries much earlier (see also UK).
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.
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.
To be honest, I'm beginning to suspect most people don't care all that much about privacy if you promise them safety.
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.
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.
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?
> we really want those border checks back
Why? You don’t need to be in the EU to belong to Shengen.
You are unironically using 'vacation destinations' as argument for modifying your legal system to fit foreign lobbying needs. All is lost.
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.
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.
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.
Boy, when you put it that way it makes me wonder why people didn't appreciate the genius of Trump's tarrifs.
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 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.
That's not regulation, that's a reduction in regulation.
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.
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.
Guardrails must be put at the constitution level, or any tech bypass can be just declared illegal.
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.
European Commission's Metsola Overrides MEPs to Force Through Chat Control
I have nothing to hide
I couldn't call you mom because the Facebook was down. What? What is a phone number?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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 :)
Looking across the Atlantic…
They are perfectly capable of doing idiotic stuff like this entirely on their own.
- 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...
Second, what's up with Denmmark pushing for it here? They're usually very reasonable.
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.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/kids-act-would-require...
> The KIDS Act Regulates Private Messages, Too
I'm to afraid of the f'ing EU to mention specific names here... But maybe some braver souls will
Hungary is often called out as a black sheep but Denmark is a wolf in sheep's clothes.
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?
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?
I have a different hypothesis for why the GDPR exists: it is to create a market for EU based compliance companies.
>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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?)
inundated with advertising, unwanted cookies, unnecessary JavaScript, false news, scams,
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 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
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.
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.
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.
This is how democracy works pretty much everywhere. You vote for parties or people based on their policies.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
EDIT: Your statements seem to be self-contradictory, so it's not even about facts. "We need a regulation because companies make and sell products with different ports" is in contradiction with "Companies wouldn't take the risk of not having a common port, and consumers won't take the risk to buy them".
Also, mine wasn't a premise. My claims are not statements that follow one from the previous, but a conjunction of negated statements laid out in chronological order. So all of them must be false or not relevant for you to be right.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In some sense Chat Control is a geopolitical necessity for the EU, there is no choice to not do it.
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...
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).
Is it democracy if they keep pushing agendas even if they are voted down?
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.
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.
"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
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?!