EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors • Hacker News Board

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#141

Post by theshrike79 » Sun, Jun 28, 2026, 4:48 PM UTC

egorfine wrote: post #101

jltsiren wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the time, when "the EU" is doing something bad, it's actually the national governments wearing a different hat. The Parliament is pretty reasonable on the average, while the national policicians in the Council take advantage of the ignorance of the public. They can pursue their favorite policies without consequences, as the EU gets all the blame.

Doesn't matter because Apple will happily implement messages scanning immediately and eagerly. And despite let's say Poland not implementing the bill, all iPhones in Poland will snitch on their owners. Tim Cook's Apple is not Steve Jobs' Apple. Case in point: my new Mac purchased in Switzerland and activated in Poland on my US Apple account required me to provide my age in the setup assistant. Neither Poland nor Swit…

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

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#142

Post by mantas » Sun, Jun 28, 2026, 4:50 PM UTC

d1sxeyes wrote: post #94

jvuygbbkuurx wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why let a middleman rentseek?

It’s not a “middleman rent seeking”, it’s protectionism. If lower cost production is available elsewhere in the world, there are three options. 1. Stop producing locally. Allow the market to take care of it. 2. Deregulate minimum wages to allow local businesses to price locally produced goods competitively. 3. Impose a tariff on incoming goods to protect local producers. Which is your preference?

Market has already did the thing. In this case it's protecting local retailers who import in bulk over consumers importing individually.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#143

Post by consensus1 » Sun, Jun 28, 2026, 4:50 PM UTC

gherkinnn wrote: post #111

cyanydeez wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

alright, but the important query is: this isn't happening in a vacuum, there's a lot of various forces. Lets say the primary force we need to prevent is russian influence campaigns that back and push far right nationalists who will destabilize democracy. Is that a sufficient reason for controls? It's always curious what people think about the actual content that's typically pushing these things.

Rubbish. Fighting fascism by implementing totalitarian tools is a ludicrous idea. Start with dismantling the means by which the information cancer spreads. No more targeted ads, no more data harvesting. Increase privacy. Everybody knows about the influence of Russian bots on the net and yet precisely fuck all is being done about it.

And how do you do that? Either you have some government agency able to quickly decide what is a "Russian bot" and censor it or you have a public deliberation process where evidence is required to be presented before censoring the Russian bot. The former is guaranteed to be abused to censor things that the government doesn't like and the latter is too slow to be of any effect.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#144

Post by xienze » Sun, Jun 28, 2026, 4:50 PM UTC

Sharlin wrote: post #87

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is going to further increase anti-EU sentiment. Rightfully so. Except for no-roaming-charges within EU, most people can't name one good regulation that came from EU and couldn't be handled individually by their own country in the last few decades. The latest example is 3eur customs tax per every item bought from china, even if it's a 1eur phone case (1eur + 3eur customs + 22% vat on both.... what's the added v…

> even if it's a 1eur phone case (1eur + 3eur customs + That's the fucking point for fuck's sake! Pardon my language, but the entire point of the tariff is to stop people from buying masses of trivial things from the other side of the world, with all the externalities that it entails. This tariff tries to cover at least some fraction of said externalities. People on HN should not be this clueless about basic economy.…

> 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.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#145

Post by wqaatwt » Sun, Jun 28, 2026, 4:51 PM UTC

aquir wrote: post #40

What's to point of all this? Everyone will use Signal or some other E2E encrypted messenger, this is just bone tossing. Useless politicans spending time on useless things.

So the EU will just tell Apple and Google to remove Signal from their app stores and 95-99% of the population won’t bother figuring out it exists..

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#146

Post by orbital-decay » Sun, Jun 28, 2026, 4:51 PM UTC

cyanydeez wrote: post #82

Havoc wrote: post #58

The global push to kill privacy makes me sad. Feels like I grew up in a golden age and subsequent generations won't care because they never knew a different world

alright, but the important query is: this isn't happening in a vacuum, there's a lot of various forces. Lets say the primary force we need to prevent is russian influence campaigns that back and push far right nationalists who will destabilize democracy. Is that a sufficient reason for controls? It's always curious what people think about the actual content that's typically pushing these things.

Is it a sufficient reason to build a cage for yourself that only needs a single regime flip to turn against you? Is it a sufficient reason to become what you're trying to avoid? Is destabilizing democracy necessary to stop the democracy from being destabilized? No, no, and no.

>russian influence campaigns

Just FYI, your rhetoric precisely mirrors Russian internal rhetoric used to boil the frog 10-15 years ago. If this doesn't make you pause and think, nothing will. In Russia people who fall for it are called "unteachable". Which makes sense, you don't seem to learn anything from their mistakes even though you have a live example of your future that you will reach with 99% certainty, without any help from your boogeymen, because your politicians mirror each step.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#147

Post by ondra » Sun, Jun 28, 2026, 4:52 PM UTC

Sharlin wrote: post #87

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is going to further increase anti-EU sentiment. Rightfully so. Except for no-roaming-charges within EU, most people can't name one good regulation that came from EU and couldn't be handled individually by their own country in the last few decades. The latest example is 3eur customs tax per every item bought from china, even if it's a 1eur phone case (1eur + 3eur customs + 22% vat on both.... what's the added v…

> even if it's a 1eur phone case (1eur + 3eur customs + That's the fucking point for fuck's sake! Pardon my language, but the entire point of the tariff is to stop people from buying masses of trivial things from the other side of the world, with all the externalities that it entails. This tariff tries to cover at least some fraction of said externalities. People on HN should not be this clueless about basic economy.…

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

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#148

Post by EdiX » Sun, Jun 28, 2026, 4:53 PM UTC

enedil wrote: post #3

blfr wrote: post #2

First, why does the EU leadership refuse to learn from falling behind the US economically and technologically, most starkly with AI recently, and their failures in regulating the Internet, most annoyingly the cookie law? And why aren't you, the EU citizen, more annoyed by it? I see a lot of pro-EU content on this site when they're terrible on both tech and entrepreneurship. Second, what's up with Denmmark pushing for…

> most annoying the cookie law Also, the least consequential even ignoring often stated fact that cookie banners are malicious compliance. I care much less about cookie banners than about the ads, and for both of I have uBlock origin filters. So, what to be angry about exactly?

"Cookie banners are malicious compliance" is starting to wear thin as an excuse. GDPR went into law in 2018, almost ten years ago and for almost as long websites have been "maliciously complying". If you don't don anything about it at some point it's not malicious anymore, it's just how the law is meant to be interpreted.

I have a different hypothesis for why the GDPR exists: it is to create a market for EU based compliance companies.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#149

Post by Gareth321 » Sun, Jun 28, 2026, 4:54 PM UTC

iamnothere wrote: post #78

tokai wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah no I don't buy that, and have never heard that angle before. Surveillance in Denmark is much older than that. Since the personal ID number was rolled out in 1968 its been one long process of integrating public systems with each other to surveil and control. Surveillance of welfare recipients started getting serious in the 00's too. The migrant crisis drove polices like the confiscations of jewelry from foreigner…

Sounds like you would know more on this, then, I had heard that there was a link between Chat Control and migration. I was also unfamiliar with Denmark’s long history of surveillance, as I’d literally never heard of this being an issue there until recently—but I do not live there. Thank you for the correction. Edit: this in no way should be read to condone Denmark’s position here.

Dane here, I don't think there is much of a link. The government is usually pragmatic about security, and has long leaned into technology to achieve it.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#150

Post by wqaatwt » Sun, Jun 28, 2026, 4:54 PM UTC

GTP wrote: post #83

wqaatwt wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn’t need the EU for the removal of trade barriers and the common market. Both were established quite a while before the EU as we know it now became a thing in the 90s. > we really want those border checks back Why? You don’t need to be in the EU to belong to Shengen.

The European Union is actually an union of treaties, with countries that sign some and not others. So here you would need to be more specific.

That used to be the case. i.e. if imposing Chat Control on all countries would have required a treaty it would hardly have any chances. However national governments have delegated the right to EU institutions to impose mandatory regulations. You can’t pick and chose anymore.