7 ms·

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

by blfr 3mo ago

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 it here? They're usually very reasonable.

enedil 3mo ago
> 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?
- olejorgenb 3mo ago
  And either 80% of banners are not respecting the law, or the law managed to omit mandating making it as easy to reject as accept... Rejecting usually require you to enter into settings and sometimes click "reject" for every individual partner(!)
  - vikaveri 3mo ago
    That was the case in the beginning, for a while. Now I rarely see even ones where I have to click Settings and Reject all, usually it's just Accept all and Accept only essential. No dark patterns just two equally visible buttons. Often also just "We use only essential cookies" and OK button because they don't have 1138 partners they want to sell your data to
    - GTP 3mo ago
      And in the latter case, they could even not put any banner at all and still be compliant. The GDPR requires consent only for tracking.
    - olejorgenb 3mo ago
      I also see more of these, but I'd say still around half require more click for "reject non-essential"
  - retired 3mo ago
    The largest Dutch tech website doesn’t adhere to the cookie law. They ever reported about websites not adhering to the law while not adhering to the law themselves.
- EdiX 3mo ago
  "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.
graemep 3mo ago
Denmark have been pushing for chat control for a long time. The American view of the EU is very much a grass is greener one. They see the things that are better than in the US but not the things that are worse.
- blfr 3mo ago
  Yes, I know they've been pushing for this when they're pretty reasonable and independent on other issues. How come?
  - sph 3mo ago
    I don't want to enter into conspiracy territory, but it seems that there's a big insistence from whomever is behind pushing for this to pass at any cost. First it was Denmark, now the EU parliament president, a Maltese. What's for certain is that those that stand to benefit massively are governments and politicians themselves. And no, it's certainly not that bullshit astroturfed story that has been going around, of Meta behind this concerted effort across the Western world because they're too lazy to validate one's age.
    - microtonal 3mo ago
      How would members of the EP benefit from Chat Control?
      - freehorse 3mo ago
        Not sure what OP meant, but they talked about goverments and "politicians" rather than EP specifically. I think several EU governments want chat control paving the way for domestic surveillance. Though I don't consider that conspiracy theory really. Last years, there have been big scandal cases with use of pegasus, predator and similar spy software from several EU governments for domestic surveillance (eg Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Spain). The issue is that legal surveillance, the regular phone tapping kind, is inefficient due to people using E2EE chat apps rather than regular phone calls and SMS. There is no legal basis for the more advanced spyware afaik, so these surveillance cases were illegal and kinda "off the books", even though rather widespread. A legal way to surveil the people would be welcome to those who did that and those who want to do the same.
basisword 3mo ago
European here. I like the cookie law. It's made it clear to people how much we're being tracked and I can choose to opt out. The implementation could of course be better but the real issue is the scummy web devs choosing to make it as annoying as possible instead of taking the more sensible decision to not have 150 trackers on every page. >> I see a lot of pro-EU content on this site when they're terrible on both tech and entrepreneurship. Life is bigger than tech or entrepreneurship. In the 00's I dreamed of moving to the US. That's changed, especially over the last decade. If I was offered a huge salary tomorrow to work in the US I would turn it down.
- microgpt 3mo ago
  Website operators hate these cookies popups because they make their website more annoying and make me more likely to press the back button and click on a different website. As it should be. This incentivizes them to stop tracking me.
  - dminik 3mo ago
    Why then do they make the most annoying, user-hostile dark pattern cookie banners they can come up with? No, website operators hate that they have to either stop spamming thousands of tracker scripts or put up a banner. They found out that they can offload blame on the EU instead and so have chosen to make the web as annoying as possible.
    - dgellow 3mo ago
      Most of them don’t care and just integrate whatever is the most common cookie banner widget because their legal team asked them to
    - anonzzzies 3mo ago
      Yeah, that's more the point; in discussions with clients I very often get asked how far we can go without any consent. Most companies want all the privacy ignoring stuff and they don't want to tell their users about it.
dgellow 3mo ago
The population doesn’t support chat control. The European Parliament rejected the chat control proposal earlier this year. Now it seems that the European Parliament president is trying to bypass that
- monssooon 3mo ago
  Well put
bluecalm 3mo ago
It's not like we can do anything. We don't have democracy - we can't vote on issues and we (in most countries) can't even vote on people. We just vote on 2-3 non-fringe parties and they choose people and policies. You may formally put an X next to some name but it's just a chosen party official. They need to walk party line and be in good standings with the leadership to even get on the list. There is just nothing you can do really in that system other than pursue career in politics which is a no-go for most people for obvious reasons.
- basisword 3mo ago
  >> We don't have democracy - we can't vote on issues This is how democracy works pretty much everywhere. You vote for parties or people based on their policies.
  - bluecalm 3mo ago
    There are too many levels of indirection. At least in some countries you can vote on a person representing your town/area. This is one level of indirection less and allows people who aren't just chosen party members to win and then they have incentives to help the region. In "standard" party democracy there is just nothing that can be done. Calling it democracy as in rule of the people is a disgrace.
  - Argonaut998 3mo ago
    The problem with the EU is that there are many levels of abstraction, and the more links in a chain the more susceptible to corruption it is. This becomes immediately obvious when you vote for a party who fails to fulfill, or even go against their policies. Then for the EU there’s an additional level of abstraction for the commission. At this level, the voter is far removed from their initial vote and are completely powerless.
- blfr 3mo ago
  Yeah, we can: I am from Poland and precisely through this mechanism our MEPs/delegates/nominates know that supporting this would be a disaster for their political group right here back home regardless of direct voting.
ezst 3mo ago
> falling behind the US economically and technologically Are you even human? Do you really believe what you say? Doesn't it come across as absurd, from everything that happened to the US since the Snowden revelations, the Patriot Act, spiraling into fascism, a first time attacking science and democracy, a second time to install oligarchs, traitors, corrupt and incompetents to run the state, with the result of tanking your real economy (on every metric that's not related to AI), burning down your soft power, burning bridges with every ally, losing the war against Iran, and causing a generational talent exodus out of the US? Oh yeah, by no means am I blindly defending "the EU leadership", but some reality check is much needed.
- nxm 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  - tokioyoyo 3mo ago
    This gets brought up a lot, and I’m not sure how to explain it. But inconsequential complete free speech is not the top issue for some people. People have different priorities.
  - tokai 3mo ago
    Right now people in the US are being designated as terrorist for being against the government.
    - dgellow 3mo ago
      And people are literally arrested for touching a pool
  - pbkompasz 3mo ago
    And at least people are not shot in the streets by the police for protesting...
    - vjjsejj 3mo ago
gib444 3mo ago
Why does any country or bloc need to learn lessons about "falling behind" the US? Why is that the yard stick? I certainly don't spend all day dreaming of F150s, McMansions, the psychopaths leading silicon valley, 9 lane highways, US style PE, and world-class fascist politicians such as Trump Dear lord
- nxm 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  - rockinghigh 3mo ago
    The US is also falling behind Chinese manufacturing. They had to ban Chinese cars because legacy American automakers couldn't compete.
    - Chu4eeno 3mo ago
      China just recently had to ban their own companies from selling cars below cost. It's not a clear win for China, their car companies are struggling.
  - yownie 3mo ago
    [flagged]
- spacebanana7 3mo ago
  A couple of decades ago both France and Britain had higher per capita GDP than the US. Now they are significantly behind. Similarly top European companies used to rival American companies in profitability, power and valuation. There’s not really an equivalent of FAANG/ NVIDIA in Europe, just ASML and LVMH.
  - thrance 3mo ago
iamnothere 3mo ago
Denmark’s recent reasonableness is somewhat of a historical aberration if you look at their history. The migrant crisis (and the failure of governments to address it) has stirred up some ugly things there.
- tokai 3mo ago
  What do you mean the migrant crisis stirred up things? The anti immigration position in danish politics has been a winning position since the mid 00's.
  - iamnothere 3mo ago
    As the crisis has worsened across Europe, Denmark started unbelievably intrusive AI-enabled mass surveillance of welfare recipients (almost 15% of the population), dangerous infrastructure which could be applied to the population as a whole. And I’d argue that fears over migrant-driven crime are what allowed Denmark’s politicians to push for Chat Control in the first place.
    - tokai 3mo ago
      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 foreigners, and public funded commercials in the middle east telling people to stay away. Internally chat control and migration are never talked about together. Chat control has no leverage on migration in Denmark. Its not a factor that would change anything. It's all about international treaties making it impossible to send people out of the country forcefully. That's the policy the migrant crisis really ignited.
      - tough 3mo ago
        I'd say the AI powered aspects of it is whats troubling. We know how trustable ai outputs are, and now govts' are ready to let the AI's control their people? https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/11/denmark-ai-powered-welfare-system-fuels-mass-surveillance-and-risks-discriminating-against-marginalized-groups-report/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/11/denmark-ai-po...
m4nu3l 3mo ago
The education system has failed in the EU, but in a different way than it has in the US. I realised this when people thought mandating the USB-C connections was a good idea because "it is the best standard". I didn't think the mandated connector was a huge deal per se, but it made it clear to me that there is a flawed thought process behind EU regulations. And this is a big deal. Many things are not really understood in the EU. The majority don't seem to understand free speech. The EU has an article about free speech that clearly states there is no free speech, but people point to it when they claim there is.
- 9dev 3mo ago
  Of all things to criticise, you pick out the one ruling that eventually lead to a consolidation of chargers? Really? I haven't ever met a single person who wasn't grateful of being able to have one cable for all their devices.
  - m4nu3l 3mo ago
    This is exactly what I'm talking about. A short-term view of the world, progress and technology. All my devices supported USB-C before the EU regulation. But if I wanted to buy a device with a new type of connector, I should have been able to. This is how the USB-C came to be and how any new standard in hardware happens. New technologies are made and just sold, and if they are proven to be superior to others in the market, they often become standards. The USB-C standard is not the best standard that can exist from now to the end of the universe, but if this discovery process is blocked, we will be stuck with it forever, which, of course, will also constrain the design and engineering of devices in other ways. It's the same fundamental flawed thought process that has made the EU reliant on the US for a lot of services.
    - 9dev 3mo ago
      > All my devices supported USB-C before the EU regulation. I don't have this particular problem so it doesn't exist! It did exist for huge amounts of people. At the time, many manufacturers had proprietary plugs and would still have them if it weren't for this decision. > The USB-C standard is not the best standard that can exist from now to the end of the universe Which is why the law can be simply amended as soon as such a standard emerges. If the industry figures out something better than USB-C, pressure will build on the council to do so. This is nothing but a straw man.
tmtvl 3mo ago
> And why aren't you, the EU citizen, more annoyed by it? Because the USA tends to privilege corporations over people whereas in the EU it's more balanced (still pretty biased towards corps, though), and I am a people, not a corporations. Take, for example, the 'cookie law': I much prefer being annoyed by the cookie pop-up over websites shoving a ton of unnecessary and unwanted cookies onto my computer without permission. ...speaking of which: > and their failures in regulating the Internet Which political entity would you say has done the best job in regulating the Internet? Where are citizens most protected from being inundated with advertising, unwanted cookies, unnecessary JavaScript, false news, scams, and all the other garbage one is normally subjected to when not putting in some amount of effort in combating that shit?
- wqaatwt 3mo ago
  And because you are grateful for the cookie policies you don’t mind rewarding them with unlimited access all your private communication? I don’t really follow this argument.. > would you say has done the best job in regulating the Internet So again.. how do these basic/superficial (or even if they are extremely effective and useful, that doesn’t really change anything) regulations justify mass surveillance? > false news For what its worth in no way has the EU been effective in doing anything about this (I’m not sure they even tried doing anything that directly addressed it?)
  - tmtvl 3mo ago
    > And because you are grateful for the cookie policies you don’t mind rewarding them with unlimited access all your private communication? No. Where do you even come up with this stuff? > So again.. how do these basic/superficial (or even if they are extremely effective and useful, that doesn’t really change anything) regulations justify mass surveillance? Answering a question with a question only works if the question used as answer is a simpler way of getting the answer to the original question. > For what its worth in no way has the EU been effective in doing anything about [fake news] Okay, so which country/state/union/whatever has been effective in doing anything about it? Because according to the post I responded to there is someone way better at regulating the Internet than the EU is, so I'm wondering who it is.
GTP 3mo ago
While the EU is not perfect and surely needs improvement in many areas, it is still better than not having it. This is why you see a lot of pro-EU content: many people here (myself included) are of the opinion that the EU needs to be improved, not dismantled.
- logicchains 3mo ago
  >While the EU is not perfect and surely needs improvement in many areas, it is still better than not having it. Would you still believe this if Chat Control got though? What good did the EU bring that's good enough to make up for the badness of everyone in Europe having all their private digital communications constantly scanned?
  - GTP 3mo ago
    Yes, definitely. Just as an example, my country wouldn't have a lot of consumer protection laws we now have thanks to the EU. As a concrete example, there used to be a single phone service provider acting as a monopolist and we had the highest phone bills in the EU. When this started to change, it still wasn't possible to keep the same phone number when switching providers, which is a huge thing for businesses and freelancers. The EU forced our government to change this. And I'm not even talking about all the financial help that we got from the EU. Which, admittedly, was used poorly by my politicians. But this isn't the EU's fault, it's their fault.
    - joe_mamba 3mo ago
      Which country are you referring to?
  - Krssst 3mo ago
    If Chat Control gets through, it means the Parliament approved it, which means the EU people voted for politicians that supported the idea. If the EU got dismantled, the same politicians would be elected (they won once why not twice) and do it again at the local level. (though, maybe not in every country)
pteraspidomorph 3mo ago
Remember it's also coming for you: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/kids-act-would-require-age-checks-get-online https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/kids-act-would-require... > The KIDS Act Regulates Private Messages, Too
monssooon 3mo ago
I think Denmark is one of the most surveiled countries. And with the most compliant population. They call it trust... Denmark is not the fairytale they try to market them selves as. This is closer to their true color in my opinion. You could also try to look up the cases with former and current politicians in dk who actually have gotten caught perpetrating the very thing chat control is said to stop. I'm to afraid of the f'ing EU to mention specific names here... But maybe some braver souls will
- joe_mamba 3mo ago
  Denmark would also sterilize indigenous Greenland population and immigrants back in the 1950s-1960s. THey have a dark side few people know about.
yesco 3mo ago
[flagged]
palata 3mo ago
> refuse to learn from falling behind the US economically The EU economy has been slowing down since 2007, the peak production of conventional oil. The US is still producing oil, which is why the US economy is better. People love to think that they are richer or more successful because they are smarter. The fact is that the economy goes up when there is an abundance of energy, period. So there is nothing to learn from falling behind the US economically, other than "the EU needs to adapt to the reality of its economy measurably slowing down". And following the US and their lack of regulations and tendency towards a fascist economy (with BigTech working together with the ruling class) is not the right direction, IMO. > I see a lot of pro-EU content on this site when they're terrible on both tech and entrepreneurship. Tech and entrepreneurs usually want to become rich by producing more. The best places to do that are where the is money, which is where the economy grows, which is where there is an abundance of cheap fossil fuels. Entrepreneurs usually say "remove the regulations and our economy will grow again", but what they mean, really, is "remove the regulations and I will get rich, because I am on the side of those who would benefit from it".

by blfr 3mo ago

enedil 3mo ago

> 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?

olejorgenb 3mo ago
And either 80% of banners are not respecting the law, or the law managed to omit mandating making it as easy to reject as accept... Rejecting usually require you to enter into settings and sometimes click "reject" for every individual partner(!)
- vikaveri 3mo ago
  That was the case in the beginning, for a while. Now I rarely see even ones where I have to click Settings and Reject all, usually it's just Accept all and Accept only essential. No dark patterns just two equally visible buttons. Often also just "We use only essential cookies" and OK button because they don't have 1138 partners they want to sell your data to
  - GTP 3mo ago
    And in the latter case, they could even not put any banner at all and still be compliant. The GDPR requires consent only for tracking.
  - olejorgenb 3mo ago
    I also see more of these, but I'd say still around half require more click for "reject non-essential"
- retired 3mo ago
  The largest Dutch tech website doesn’t adhere to the cookie law. They ever reported about websites not adhering to the law while not adhering to the law themselves.
EdiX 3mo ago
"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.

graemep 3mo ago

Denmark have been pushing for chat control for a long time. The American view of the EU is very much a grass is greener one. They see the things that are better than in the US but not the things that are worse.

blfr 3mo ago
Yes, I know they've been pushing for this when they're pretty reasonable and independent on other issues. How come?
- sph 3mo ago
  I don't want to enter into conspiracy territory, but it seems that there's a big insistence from whomever is behind pushing for this to pass at any cost. First it was Denmark, now the EU parliament president, a Maltese. What's for certain is that those that stand to benefit massively are governments and politicians themselves. And no, it's certainly not that bullshit astroturfed story that has been going around, of Meta behind this concerted effort across the Western world because they're too lazy to validate one's age.
  - microtonal 3mo ago
    How would members of the EP benefit from Chat Control?
    - freehorse 3mo ago
      Not sure what OP meant, but they talked about goverments and "politicians" rather than EP specifically. I think several EU governments want chat control paving the way for domestic surveillance. Though I don't consider that conspiracy theory really. Last years, there have been big scandal cases with use of pegasus, predator and similar spy software from several EU governments for domestic surveillance (eg Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Spain). The issue is that legal surveillance, the regular phone tapping kind, is inefficient due to people using E2EE chat apps rather than regular phone calls and SMS. There is no legal basis for the more advanced spyware afaik, so these surveillance cases were illegal and kinda "off the books", even though rather widespread. A legal way to surveil the people would be welcome to those who did that and those who want to do the same.

basisword 3mo ago

European here. I like the cookie law. It's made it clear to people how much we're being tracked and I can choose to opt out. The implementation could of course be better but the real issue is the scummy web devs choosing to make it as annoying as possible instead of taking the more sensible decision to not have 150 trackers on every page. >> I see a lot of pro-EU content on this site when they're terrible on both tech and entrepreneurship. Life is bigger than tech or entrepreneurship. In the 00's I dreamed of moving to the US. That's changed, especially over the last decade. If I was offered a huge salary tomorrow to work in the US I would turn it down.

microgpt 3mo ago
Website operators hate these cookies popups because they make their website more annoying and make me more likely to press the back button and click on a different website. As it should be. This incentivizes them to stop tracking me.
- dminik 3mo ago
  Why then do they make the most annoying, user-hostile dark pattern cookie banners they can come up with? No, website operators hate that they have to either stop spamming thousands of tracker scripts or put up a banner. They found out that they can offload blame on the EU instead and so have chosen to make the web as annoying as possible.
  - dgellow 3mo ago
    Most of them don’t care and just integrate whatever is the most common cookie banner widget because their legal team asked them to
  - anonzzzies 3mo ago
    Yeah, that's more the point; in discussions with clients I very often get asked how far we can go without any consent. Most companies want all the privacy ignoring stuff and they don't want to tell their users about it.

dgellow 3mo ago

The population doesn’t support chat control. The European Parliament rejected the chat control proposal earlier this year. Now it seems that the European Parliament president is trying to bypass that

monssooon 3mo ago
Well put

bluecalm 3mo ago

It's not like we can do anything. We don't have democracy - we can't vote on issues and we (in most countries) can't even vote on people. We just vote on 2-3 non-fringe parties and they choose people and policies. You may formally put an X next to some name but it's just a chosen party official. They need to walk party line and be in good standings with the leadership to even get on the list. There is just nothing you can do really in that system other than pursue career in politics which is a no-go for most people for obvious reasons.

basisword 3mo ago
>> We don't have democracy - we can't vote on issues This is how democracy works pretty much everywhere. You vote for parties or people based on their policies.
- bluecalm 3mo ago
  There are too many levels of indirection. At least in some countries you can vote on a person representing your town/area. This is one level of indirection less and allows people who aren't just chosen party members to win and then they have incentives to help the region. In "standard" party democracy there is just nothing that can be done. Calling it democracy as in rule of the people is a disgrace.
- Argonaut998 3mo ago
  The problem with the EU is that there are many levels of abstraction, and the more links in a chain the more susceptible to corruption it is. This becomes immediately obvious when you vote for a party who fails to fulfill, or even go against their policies. Then for the EU there’s an additional level of abstraction for the commission. At this level, the voter is far removed from their initial vote and are completely powerless.
blfr 3mo ago
Yeah, we can: I am from Poland and precisely through this mechanism our MEPs/delegates/nominates know that supporting this would be a disaster for their political group right here back home regardless of direct voting.

ezst 3mo ago

> falling behind the US economically and technologically Are you even human? Do you really believe what you say? Doesn't it come across as absurd, from everything that happened to the US since the Snowden revelations, the Patriot Act, spiraling into fascism, a first time attacking science and democracy, a second time to install oligarchs, traitors, corrupt and incompetents to run the state, with the result of tanking your real economy (on every metric that's not related to AI), burning down your soft power, burning bridges with every ally, losing the war against Iran, and causing a generational talent exodus out of the US? Oh yeah, by no means am I blindly defending "the EU leadership", but some reality check is much needed.

nxm 3mo ago
[flagged]
- tokioyoyo 3mo ago
  This gets brought up a lot, and I’m not sure how to explain it. But inconsequential complete free speech is not the top issue for some people. People have different priorities.
- tokai 3mo ago
  Right now people in the US are being designated as terrorist for being against the government.
  - dgellow 3mo ago
    And people are literally arrested for touching a pool
- pbkompasz 3mo ago
  And at least people are not shot in the streets by the police for protesting...
  - vjjsejj 3mo ago

gib444 3mo ago

Why does any country or bloc need to learn lessons about "falling behind" the US? Why is that the yard stick? I certainly don't spend all day dreaming of F150s, McMansions, the psychopaths leading silicon valley, 9 lane highways, US style PE, and world-class fascist politicians such as Trump Dear lord

nxm 3mo ago
[flagged]
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- rockinghigh 3mo ago
  The US is also falling behind Chinese manufacturing. They had to ban Chinese cars because legacy American automakers couldn't compete.
  - Chu4eeno 3mo ago
    China just recently had to ban their own companies from selling cars below cost. It's not a clear win for China, their car companies are struggling.
- yownie 3mo ago
  [flagged]
spacebanana7 3mo ago
A couple of decades ago both France and Britain had higher per capita GDP than the US. Now they are significantly behind. Similarly top European companies used to rival American companies in profitability, power and valuation. There’s not really an equivalent of FAANG/ NVIDIA in Europe, just ASML and LVMH.
- thrance 3mo ago

iamnothere 3mo ago

Denmark’s recent reasonableness is somewhat of a historical aberration if you look at their history. The migrant crisis (and the failure of governments to address it) has stirred up some ugly things there.

tokai 3mo ago
What do you mean the migrant crisis stirred up things? The anti immigration position in danish politics has been a winning position since the mid 00's.
- iamnothere 3mo ago
  As the crisis has worsened across Europe, Denmark started unbelievably intrusive AI-enabled mass surveillance of welfare recipients (almost 15% of the population), dangerous infrastructure which could be applied to the population as a whole. And I’d argue that fears over migrant-driven crime are what allowed Denmark’s politicians to push for Chat Control in the first place.
  - tokai 3mo ago
    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 foreigners, and public funded commercials in the middle east telling people to stay away. Internally chat control and migration are never talked about together. Chat control has no leverage on migration in Denmark. Its not a factor that would change anything. It's all about international treaties making it impossible to send people out of the country forcefully. That's the policy the migrant crisis really ignited.
    - tough 3mo ago
      I'd say the AI powered aspects of it is whats troubling. We know how trustable ai outputs are, and now govts' are ready to let the AI's control their people? https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/11/denmark-ai-powered-welfare-system-fuels-mass-surveillance-and-risks-discriminating-against-marginalized-groups-report/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/11/denmark-ai-po...

m4nu3l 3mo ago

The education system has failed in the EU, but in a different way than it has in the US. I realised this when people thought mandating the USB-C connections was a good idea because "it is the best standard". I didn't think the mandated connector was a huge deal per se, but it made it clear to me that there is a flawed thought process behind EU regulations. And this is a big deal. Many things are not really understood in the EU. The majority don't seem to understand free speech. The EU has an article about free speech that clearly states there is no free speech, but people point to it when they claim there is.

9dev 3mo ago
Of all things to criticise, you pick out the one ruling that eventually lead to a consolidation of chargers? Really? I haven't ever met a single person who wasn't grateful of being able to have one cable for all their devices.
- m4nu3l 3mo ago
  This is exactly what I'm talking about. A short-term view of the world, progress and technology. All my devices supported USB-C before the EU regulation. But if I wanted to buy a device with a new type of connector, I should have been able to. This is how the USB-C came to be and how any new standard in hardware happens. New technologies are made and just sold, and if they are proven to be superior to others in the market, they often become standards. The USB-C standard is not the best standard that can exist from now to the end of the universe, but if this discovery process is blocked, we will be stuck with it forever, which, of course, will also constrain the design and engineering of devices in other ways. It's the same fundamental flawed thought process that has made the EU reliant on the US for a lot of services.
  - 9dev 3mo ago
    > All my devices supported USB-C before the EU regulation. I don't have this particular problem so it doesn't exist! It did exist for huge amounts of people. At the time, many manufacturers had proprietary plugs and would still have them if it weren't for this decision. > The USB-C standard is not the best standard that can exist from now to the end of the universe Which is why the law can be simply amended as soon as such a standard emerges. If the industry figures out something better than USB-C, pressure will build on the council to do so. This is nothing but a straw man.

tmtvl 3mo ago

> And why aren't you, the EU citizen, more annoyed by it? Because the USA tends to privilege corporations over people whereas in the EU it's more balanced (still pretty biased towards corps, though), and I am a people, not a corporations. Take, for example, the 'cookie law': I much prefer being annoyed by the cookie pop-up over websites shoving a ton of unnecessary and unwanted cookies onto my computer without permission. ...speaking of which: > and their failures in regulating the Internet Which political entity would you say has done the best job in regulating the Internet? Where are citizens most protected from being inundated with advertising, unwanted cookies, unnecessary JavaScript, false news, scams, and all the other garbage one is normally subjected to when not putting in some amount of effort in combating that shit?

wqaatwt 3mo ago
And because you are grateful for the cookie policies you don’t mind rewarding them with unlimited access all your private communication? I don’t really follow this argument.. > would you say has done the best job in regulating the Internet So again.. how do these basic/superficial (or even if they are extremely effective and useful, that doesn’t really change anything) regulations justify mass surveillance? > false news For what its worth in no way has the EU been effective in doing anything about this (I’m not sure they even tried doing anything that directly addressed it?)
- tmtvl 3mo ago
  > And because you are grateful for the cookie policies you don’t mind rewarding them with unlimited access all your private communication? No. Where do you even come up with this stuff? > So again.. how do these basic/superficial (or even if they are extremely effective and useful, that doesn’t really change anything) regulations justify mass surveillance? Answering a question with a question only works if the question used as answer is a simpler way of getting the answer to the original question. > For what its worth in no way has the EU been effective in doing anything about [fake news] Okay, so which country/state/union/whatever has been effective in doing anything about it? Because according to the post I responded to there is someone way better at regulating the Internet than the EU is, so I'm wondering who it is.

GTP 3mo ago

While the EU is not perfect and surely needs improvement in many areas, it is still better than not having it. This is why you see a lot of pro-EU content: many people here (myself included) are of the opinion that the EU needs to be improved, not dismantled.

logicchains 3mo ago
>While the EU is not perfect and surely needs improvement in many areas, it is still better than not having it. Would you still believe this if Chat Control got though? What good did the EU bring that's good enough to make up for the badness of everyone in Europe having all their private digital communications constantly scanned?
- GTP 3mo ago
  Yes, definitely. Just as an example, my country wouldn't have a lot of consumer protection laws we now have thanks to the EU. As a concrete example, there used to be a single phone service provider acting as a monopolist and we had the highest phone bills in the EU. When this started to change, it still wasn't possible to keep the same phone number when switching providers, which is a huge thing for businesses and freelancers. The EU forced our government to change this. And I'm not even talking about all the financial help that we got from the EU. Which, admittedly, was used poorly by my politicians. But this isn't the EU's fault, it's their fault.
  - joe_mamba 3mo ago
    Which country are you referring to?
- Krssst 3mo ago
  If Chat Control gets through, it means the Parliament approved it, which means the EU people voted for politicians that supported the idea. If the EU got dismantled, the same politicians would be elected (they won once why not twice) and do it again at the local level. (though, maybe not in every country)

pteraspidomorph 3mo ago

Remember it's also coming for you: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/kids-act-would-require-age-checks-get-online https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/kids-act-would-require... > The KIDS Act Regulates Private Messages, Too

monssooon 3mo ago

I think Denmark is one of the most surveiled countries. And with the most compliant population. They call it trust... Denmark is not the fairytale they try to market them selves as. This is closer to their true color in my opinion. You could also try to look up the cases with former and current politicians in dk who actually have gotten caught perpetrating the very thing chat control is said to stop. I'm to afraid of the f'ing EU to mention specific names here... But maybe some braver souls will

joe_mamba 3mo ago
Denmark would also sterilize indigenous Greenland population and immigrants back in the 1950s-1960s. THey have a dark side few people know about.

yesco 3mo ago

[flagged]

palata 3mo ago

> refuse to learn from falling behind the US economically The EU economy has been slowing down since 2007, the peak production of conventional oil. The US is still producing oil, which is why the US economy is better. People love to think that they are richer or more successful because they are smarter. The fact is that the economy goes up when there is an abundance of energy, period. So there is nothing to learn from falling behind the US economically, other than "the EU needs to adapt to the reality of its economy measurably slowing down". And following the US and their lack of regulations and tendency towards a fascist economy (with BigTech working together with the ruling class) is not the right direction, IMO. > I see a lot of pro-EU content on this site when they're terrible on both tech and entrepreneurship. Tech and entrepreneurs usually want to become rich by producing more. The best places to do that are where the is money, which is where the economy grows, which is where there is an abundance of cheap fossil fuels. Entrepreneurs usually say "remove the regulations and our economy will grow again", but what they mean, really, is "remove the regulations and I will get rich, because I am on the side of those who would benefit from it".