EU Parliamentary Research Service calls VPNs "a loophole that needs closing"

They did that? Where?

I’m also assuming you’re from England, otherwise you’re also a foreigner speaking their language, and likely with considerable difference.

Registering a phone number with the official company registry is sure to get you a scam call within the hour. People will come up to your house later to sell you power contracts you don't need, phone numbers you never wanted, and they will lie through their teeth to forge your signature if you don't agree. If you're unlucky, you'll be fighting a handful of scam companies in court within the first year, charging you thousands every month, because B2B contracts don't have the kind of protections customers have.

The only way to live a somewhat safe life as a small business owner is to have a dedicated phone number you never answer and a dedicated post office address where nobody lives.

These kinds of requirements made a lot of sense thirty years ago, but nowadays, with billions of people able to abuse every bit of information you publish instantly from anywhere while you're asleep, it makes a lot less sense.

In theory this documentation can be used to prevent scams and crimes, but actual enforcement of people's identities has become a problem, and the criminals have plenty of unsuspecting family members, homeless people, or mentally handicapped adults they can pressure into signing papers.

With the EU's current approach, disconnecting the two is the exact point. There is no third party, the government ID you already have can be used to verify your age directly with an online service.

No, it wasn't. She was chosen by a group of country leaders during a closed doors voting.

If it's democratic at all, it's very tangential.

I care about far more than privacy. These matters are about societal stability, the panopticon, societal robustness in cases of downturns or wars, the ability to counter the mass control capabilities of artificial intelligence - and much more.

> Android being locked down is the worst case scenario: private companies makes rules, an update is pushed, no platform for discourse.

Personally I'm blaming the lock-down on Android just as much on governments as I do Google, because I believe that they have failed greatly at finding ways to interact with modern technology. Instead of heaping ever more complicated requirements on the platform providers and issuing arbitrary fines, they could likely achieve much more by doing less - e.g. by saying "anyone must be allowed to run the software they want on the device that they own" and "when a person pays for a device they own the device" (I believe there are many other answers to this question that would scale far better than current approaches). Fundamentally, a big part of the problem is the many responsibilities and goals of the government where some of them run counter to allowing such freedoms.

> I like this! It's not "perfect", but i prefer this 1000 times over "let Google verify my age".

Personally I think this should be solved to a satisfactory degree by simply requiring anyone that wants to provide access to content that by law is age restricted to simply advertise this with headers similar to CORS that browsers must respect, such that the configuration of the browser blocks access to those not of age. It is then the responsibility of the parents to configure the devices of their children such that they cannot access age restricted content. It makes perfect sense to have a "child mode" for browsers and operating systems, where the person configuring the setup makes this determination without involving centrally approved systems. To the degree that such a solution would have workarounds I'm absolutely not convinced that the detriments of this is worth the additional costs on restricting the freedom of citizens.

> Now to tech details. Locking down network is impossible as long as decentralization is possible.

This is a plain incorrect view at scale. If the EU decides to either ban E2EE/require client-side scanning/require backdoors, then all major chat applications will have to adhere to this, and it will no longer be practical or possible to have an application like Signal installed on your phone. This means that when being investigated by the police, or e.g. when traveling and being searched, you will be breaking the law by having such an application and will by default be a criminal. The magical part of digital fascism is exactly that it is very effectively enforceable at scale. If you require all computers to only run software that is approved by the government, and you outlaw software that allow unsurveilled communication, then digital fascism allows you to enforce this to a previously unseen degree, exactly because you can prevent any computer from being allowed to run it.

These are quantum differences - not differences of better vs worse. They are also differences of societal and technological lock-in - as once you give up the ability to communicate freely you may never get it back. Right now; Tor, VPNs, Signal, are all legal to use within the EU. However, if you make them illegal and you enforce computers, operating systems, and networks to disallow them, then it becomes far more difficult for anyone to work outside the allowed bounds, both due to technical difficulty as well as criminal liability. This is digital fascism.