EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

EU law 101: (1) EU Commission (i.e. the executive) proposes a law; (2) EU Parliament signs off on it; (3) EU Council (i.e. the equivalent of a senate, comprising national governments) puts the final stamp on it.

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.

> you just have to provide USB-C option as a fallback.

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.

This "keep asking until they say yes" strategy is by design and has been a common tactic used by the EU power centers in the past. See the way the Treaty of Lisbon was rejected in referendums, and then people were just made to vote again. Or the way the British pro-EU faction proclaimed in 2016 that Leave/Remain was a once in a generation vote to settle the issue for all time, then immediately started agitating for an aptly named People's Vote that would rerun the referendum again.

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.

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.

What's interesting to me is that this is a bit like how the USSR worked.

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.