While I broadly agree that this (and other attempts in Australia and rumblings about it in UK) may have been the impetus for developing the technology, I'm not

While I broadly agree that this (and other attempts in Australia and rumblings about it in UK) may have been the impetus for developing the technology, I'm not sure it explains why they released it on Photos, where Apple holds the keys, and not very far since you can look at your entire photo roll on icloud.com with just your username and password. That tech is not being deployed on iMessage which is the only e2ee(ish) service from Apple (with Keychain) and is what those legislative attempts are usually targeting. One could argue it would have made sense (technically) there though, sure. Was it a reason to release it preventively, on something unrelated, to be in the good graces of legislators ? I'm not sure it's a good calculation, and it doesn't cover other platforms like Signal and Telegram that would still be seen as a problem by those legislators and require them to legislate anyway.