> In the past

Exactly. That time is mostly over.

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.

They want to pick the easy fruit. The dumb criminals that would do that sort of thing over whatsapp.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

I'm completely serious here; the former minister of law was beaten as a child and it informs his whole world view.

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.

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.

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.

They saw Sweeden and freaked out, Denmark being already a nanny state.

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.

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)

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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/...

> 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.

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.

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.

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).

And the banners are not about cookies specifically, they are about tracking. It's illegal to track people without consent.

Cookies have literally nothing to do with GDPR or the ePrivacy directive. It is mentioned I think twice total in both documents as an example of how user data is persisted and tracked across domains, but ultimately the mechanism is irrelevant.

> So you like the law, but don't like how it didn't actually solve the problem it was trying to solve?

(Not the person you replied to)

I'm not sure where all of this is coming from, the law is actually extremely obvious and useful: you want to track people, they have to be informed, and have to consent. The law says nothing about how, and the way it was implemented was entirely up to the corporations discretion, which of course opted for the most malicious terrible way to do it, but they did it.

The purpose of the law was that people should be informed about cookies being installed and consent to that happening.

Do you feel like people are now aware that cookies are being installed, more so than before the banner? Do people understand that they are consenting to this?

That is the law at work.

Everything above and beyond that is nice to have, and I'm sure the world would be better for it, but without the EU, people probably wouldn't even know what cookies were, let alone understand (or have control over) how they are being tracked.

If that's not a net positive in a world where net-negatives happen every week, I don't know.

> I don't want a set of rules that given enough funding any company is able to win as a negative sum game. I want a jury, not a trailing clause, to decide if the company is clearly acting in good faith or worthy of apocalyptic fines.

You want the winner to be the side with more expensive lawyers who use psychological manipulation techniques against a jury?

In general juries are the finders of fact. They decide what happened, e.g. who is lying. Judges decide the law, i.e. whether the thing the jury says they did is a violation of the law.

What you're asking for is to have the jury decide what the law is. There are a lot of problems with that, but one of the big ones is that jury determinations don't have to follow precedent and, unless you want judges ultimately deciding it anyway, can't really be appealed. Which would result in zillions of spurious lawsuits against innocent people because a small percentage of them would win big at random.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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

The problem with the EU is that there are many levels of abstraction, and the more links in a chain the more susceptible to corruption it is.

This becomes immediately obvious when you vote for a party who fails to fulfill, or even go against their policies. Then for the EU there’s an additional level of abstraction for the commission. At this level, the voter is far removed from their initial vote and are completely powerless.

There are too many levels of indirection. At least in some countries you can vote on a person representing your town/area. This is one level of indirection less and allows people who aren't just chosen party members to win and then they have incentives to help the region.

In "standard" party democracy there is just nothing that can be done. Calling it democracy as in rule of the people is a disgrace.

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.

Yeah, your family members will be more than happy to tag you once Facebook asks them who that person on a group photo is.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

Voting and broadcasting (and here we are broadcasting) are different things.

> 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.

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.

https://data.europa.eu/apps/eusanctionstracker/subjects/1756...

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.

And you think Google or Samsung will fight tooth and nail against EU not to implement it?

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

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 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.

Abolishing the European Commission would be seen as an attack on the individual countries' sovereignty as it would give more power to the EU.

Well of course it's about building data centers. There are exactly 3 options for you:

1. use "giant polluting AI data centers" in the US or China

2. build "giant polluting AI data centers" in the EU

3. do without modern technology

Option 1 fails at "how do we take our data back from the Americans" and option 3 is insanity and will fail at the ballot box. So get ready for option 2.

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

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.

Why one couldn't have all these without the EU ?

> Being able to go on vacation with no trouble is massive.

You are unironically using 'vacation destinations' as argument for modifying your legal system to fit foreign lobbying needs. All is lost.

The custom thing started from basically the beginning of eu, this wasn't done in the last decades, but the customs chargers for outside stuff have been increased by the EU. The large corporations are not reall accountable, Volkswagen screwed up, americans got buyback programms, hyundai/kia screwed up, americans got gas cards... intel scews up (spectre, no hyperthreading to keep safe), europeans get nothing. And yes, there are border checks within EU, just had to show my ID yesterday on the slovenia-austria border.

Why let a middleman rentseek?

This is global trade and comparative advantage at work. If someone outside the country can produce an equivalent product to what a local producer would make, they can supply it to our market more efficiently than our local producers, and there are no moral qualms (for example people working under conditions that are unacceptable by our standards) then everyone benefits from the import arrangement except for the local producers who can't compete.

From an economic perspective the local producer then needs to become more efficient and/or produce a better product to remain competitive. Alternatively they can do something else that is a more productive use of their time and skills. Again this is just a free market at work. The economic principle is no different if another local producer opened down the road from the existing local producer and they were the ones making the same product cheaper or a better product for the same price.

Protectionism arguably has a place. For vital interests like national defence there is an argument for making certain things locally so you have complete control because of the security implications and because the normal rules of international trade and diplomacy might not be working properly at the time when you need those products. But even in fields like defence and strategic infrastructure and perhaps the most obvious example of simply putting enough food on everyone's plate to survive there are few if any Western nations that don't rely significantly on international trade.

There is an example I always remember from the Brexit debates here in the UK. The Remain campaigners talked a lot about the advantages of being in the EU's Single Market and Customs Union. (These are the two big economic arrangements in the EU that allow member states to trade freely among themselves without tariffs or non-tariff barriers.) And certainly for intra-EU trade they do offer many economic advantages.

However the cost of being under the protectionist umbrella was much less discussed - surprisingly even by Leave campaigners. All member states are required to apply the common EU-based tariffs to anything coming into their country from outside the union. So when the EU introduced extremely high tariffs to protect the fruit growers in its Mediterranean member states that was good for those growers. But we don't exactly grow a lot of citrus fruit in the UK with our milder northern European climate. We also already had some established trade routes with north African nations that could supply similar products at potentially lower cost and would have liked to increase that trade with us - a mutual benefit for both their suppliers and our consumers that would have cost neither of us anything directly. The EU tariffs made that financially unviable and therefore benefitted some of the southern member states but at the expense of both consumers in the UK (also an EU member state at the time!) and the more efficient suppliers from Africa.

Protectionism is inherently inefficient economically. Sometimes it might be appropriate for other reasons but in purely financial terms it's almost always a negative effect.

Because we don't make those socks locally. They come from the other side of the globe.

For example, i want to buy a phone case... i can order one on aliexpress for ~1eur (free shipping) + 3eur tax + 88cents of vat and pay 4.88for it.

Or I can go to my local mall, and buy the identical case, made by the same chinese manufacturer for 12-15eur. The middleman can order 100 of those cases and since they're the same TARIC code, he'll still just pay 3eur (total) in customs for all of them (3% customs, instead of 300% if you order 1 piece only) and still be much more expensive than if I order directly from china.

So instead of paying 1eur + having 4 eur left over to go for a beer, i now pay almost 5eur, no local beer and 75% of that tax doesn't even go to my country but directly into EU budget. I can afford less and won't get anything out of that money. Yes, there's an employee in that cell phone store, but so is there an employee in my local bar where I can't afford beer anymore because EU took my money.

This is obviously not the point if the surcharge disappears on packages with total price over 150 €.

When Trump introduced tariffs everyone screamed but now the EU does EXACTLY the same and suddenly it's okay.

> That's the fucking point for fuck's sake! Pardon my language, but the entire point of the tariff is to stop people from buying masses of trivial things from the other side of the world, with all the externalities that it entails. This tariff tries to cover at least some fraction of said externalities.

Boy, when you put it that way it makes me wonder why people didn't appreciate the genius of Trump's tarrifs.

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.

>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.

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.

how are modern riots being organized on a massive scale? I'm curious

Would love to see some statistics on that.

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?

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 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.