Not surprised by this move, the UK is preparing to silence dissent, for a very simple reason: tough times ahead. Guardian reported yesterday the UK might face food shortages, their young are increasingly burdened with supporting the triple lock through their taxes, and people are making exit plans rathert than be milked for their hard work.
You're asking too much from bureaucrats that stand to directly gain post-mandate by consulting the companies they legislate for, and also believe that the legitimacy of the EU as a whole should be driven by output (economic prosperity, etc), rather than input (democratic mandates, political participation of their constituents)
> the laws and regulations imposed upon citizens are hostile.
Let's not forget that these laws are supported and pushed for by national governments in the EU Council, there's no shadowy cabal that materializes these laws out of thin air, the EU is a blame-laundromat for domestically unpopular laws passed through backroom deals
If there's no shadowy cabal then why do our politicians continue to pass domestically unpopular laws? I mean, there doesn't have to be a literal shadowy cabal, the effective "cabal" could be a combination of corruption, lobbying and pressure from security agencies.
Apart from this law-trickery used here: The EU could be a thing that helps fixing the problems that the single nations cannot overcome, even if it becomes unpopular.
Fixing climate change involves completely restricting fossil fuel AND harvesting existing greenhouse gases (which costs additional energy) until the atmosphere is back to 1800. No government of this world spoke this truth to its people, because after the next election that government would be no more.
The slipperiness comes from the fact that the EU already admits that scanning of private messages didn't improve the catching and prosecution of perpetrators. Also, the biggest lobbyists for breaking E2EE argue that criminals are moving to encrypted platforms, and targeting encrypted platforms is actually the thing we need to finally put a dent in stopping the dissemination of CSAM
If local scanning of CSAM flags a post, that post will have to be analysed by a human operator. If you send a sensitive photo of your kid's rash to your spouse, and it gets flagged, are you ok with a random cyber enforcement officer seeing your child in that way?
"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". -- Jean-Claude Juncker, VDL's predecessor
The Internet Watch Foundation, the group, funded almost entirely by big tech, who pushed for this vote to be held under emergency procedure, is already at work lobbying for the end of E2EE [1].
In a couple years time, Chat Control 2.0 will come about, and the same tyrants will use the EU admission [2] that there is no evidence that suspicionless scanning of private communications has led to an increase in criminal convictions or in rescued children to argue that we need to go further, and break E2EE.
Why would big tech be in favor of having to scan message content? It puts more regulatory requirements in place on their activities. Would they not be in favor of _less_ regulation so they can provide services to their users with fewer legal considerations?
If big tech _wanted_ to they could already backdoor their encryption and scan the message content, they don't need regulation to do that. The only thing that changes with regulation is that they now _have_ to, which cannot possibly be in their favor.
> Would they not be in favor of _less_ regulation so they can provide services to their users with fewer legal considerations?
Regulatory capture. If the handling of user messages requires constant scanning and there are enough rules that you need a team of lawyers, then only Google, Meta and Apple will be able to afford it.
Also without chat control they would have to follow much stricter eprivacy directive laws that makes many of their monetisation strategies ilegal.
It's briliant really... instead of trying to dismantle privacy regulations you push for new regulation that overrides them and make data mining users even mandatory.
Where did you get that impression? The main driver for Chat Control 2.0 is lobby org Internet Watch Foundation where Apple one of the main donors (along with Meta, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI)
In a same way - just because a charity claims they want to solve child porn doesn't mean that their real aim is to help their donors.
In any case the OP claimed "Apple is wholly against Chat Control." i don't think it's so wholly if Apple financially supports biggest pro Chat Control proponents. Even if Apple is aware of it or not.
That is regulatory capture but it really feels like it should be called something else.
If the laws are designed to directly benefit it makes sense like with the FAA allowing Boeing to self regulate to the point of killing a few hundred people. This feels more like bureaucratic capture or some other name, where the entity must be so large to interact.
It has the same effect and you are not wrong, I just wish it was clearer.
I cannot imagine Musk simply submitting to this sort of EU demand, and he has enough hue-and-cry capability on X to maneuver other tech firms into very uncomfortable positions in the same regard.
Dream on. X corp is one of the sponsors of Internet Watch Foundation who are the lobby group behind Chat Control. Musk might play how terrible this is for his audience but in reality they sell all the user data and train their models on it just like every other big tech corp.
Blud thinks musk has any principles, he is literally grifting for maga to stop immigration and then goes and facilitates h1b when there are plenty of talented workers that could be hired.
That guy is outright cheerleading fascists in European countries and wants to put them in power. Why would he want to take away such a powerful tool from them?
Once a law is passed that permits abuse of power, that new toy is available to whoever is in control of the government, which could be the parties he likes. Seen this kind of thing over and over again when one group gains control of a level of government, passes a bunch of authoritarian crap under the belief they have a mandate to rule forever, and then lose power, giving their opponents control over that new authoritarian toy. In the end, the political class gains more power and the public loses. What rarely happens is a change in leadership giving up the power the previous leadership gave itself.
The Internet Watch Foundation is one of these NGOs that makes lists of hashed child porn images and URLs. All the big tech companies subscribe so they can coordinate on blocking child porn, as they are legally required to do.
Unfortunately the IWF is also a "charity" and thus engages in political lobbying. Because like all such NGOs they have a single purpose, they lobby for making that purpose easier irregardless of other costs, which they view as out of scope. It's obviously easier to watch the internet if tech firms are forced to watch everything all the time, so that's what they're in favour of.
People actually working at tech firms on messaging systems don't want to do this, however. So they end up funding people who are undermining their own policies. This is very common whenever NGOs get involved e.g. governments funding NGOs that directly undermine the government's own efforts.
The fix would be for tech firms to leave the IWF and set up their own alternative organization that doesn't engage in lobbying activity. However, that would require a lot of cross-org agility that is difficult for big companies to achieve even internally, let alone across the industry, and the leadership is all thinking about AI anyway not EU stuff where they already just assume the EU is going to regulate them all the death anyway. So inertia carries the day.
I think this is basically correct and aligns with Facebook’s massive push toward e2ee in Messenger. They don’t want to be on the hook, and didn’t do e2ee just for the fun of it
Honestly they have a lot of members including the BBC for some reason, Apple is one of them. It seems like it might just be good practice to support them, it signals ‘we are against child abuse’. Dropping support could lead to some bad headlines. Seems like an NGO that is really good at sales, probably putting some pressure on it’s members rather than the other way around.
I get that if you are an ngo that really wants to solve online child abuse you’d want a law like this. It may be mostly the ngo pushing for it, not necessarily big tech. I could be wrong.
