4 ms·

This is going to further increase anti-EU sentiment. This is unacceptable behaviour, but no politician is ever going to experience any negative consequences ove

by elric 4mo ago

This is going to further increase anti-EU sentiment. This is unacceptable behaviour, but no politician is ever going to experience any negative consequences over this because they're so very far removed from the democratic process.

microtonal 4mo ago
Still, this is mostly pushed by particular countries (e.g. Denmark), the commission and aggressively pursued by lobbyist. The most democratic body in the EU (the EP) has so far always rejected Chat Control. Without the EU, this would have been introduced in some member countries much earlier (see also UK).
- elric 4mo ago
  Yes, EP has rejected it, and now the president of the EP is ignoring that outcome.
- ajsnigrutin 4mo ago
  It only has to pass once, and we have to scream about it every goddamn time try try. And they'll try and try again and again.
- logicchains 4mo ago
  >Without the EU, this would have been introduced in some member countries much earlier (see also UK). And without the EU there'd be some states in which it would never be introduced. Decentralization is what made Europe so successful historically compared to large centralized empires like China and the Ottomans, and the EU is destroying that.
  - dgellow 4mo ago
    What you call decentralization and „so successful“ resulted in constant wars and conflicts. Europe would be in a way worse place right now without some form of union like the EU
    - logicchains 4mo ago
      Those constant wars and conflicts were what pushed European countries to develop the military technologies that allowed them to conquer most of the world.
      - dgellow 4mo ago
        Are you defending colonization, or am I misunderstanding you? When you say conquer, I think you mean invade, genocide, enslave, subject most of the world. We also killed each others for the most petty reasons ever instead of working towards a common goal
- xinayder 4mo ago
  Let it not be forgotten that when Denmark was president of the Council of EU and tried to push this forward, one of the former colleagues/friends of the justice minister was charged with child abuse in 2025. Just search Henrik Sass Larssen and Peter Humeelgaard. We should start digging into the lives of those pushing for mandated age verification, chat control, and other privacy killing measures to show the world their true face. The public deserves to know who exactly is pushing for the "privacy law for kids" agenda.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
- Gareth321 4mo ago
  I can speak for the sentiment in Denmark: most people are unaware of this legislation. A vocal minority of us (who are a little too online) have been trying to educate people, but I think it feels too esoteric. We had a poll last year which asked, "the ability to detect child abuse is more important than the right to online privacy." 65% of people said yes, 33% said both are equally important, and only 2% said online privacy is more important. The discussion for normal people is often couched in the language of "think of the children." Unfortunately, that appears to be highly effective with the Danes. To be honest, I'm beginning to suspect most people don't care all that much about privacy if you promise them safety.
ajsnigrutin 4mo ago
> 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 value of custom tax? who knows, but you pay it anyway). Add all the money wasting, horrible behaviour of politicians in charge, overpaid MEPs for what they do... it's no wonder people hate everything EU related. All sticks, no carrots.
- kubafu 4mo ago
  Tell me you don't see the value in the tax as a way of discouraging people from ordering a pair of socks from the other side of the globe, while they can buy them locally?
  - Silhouette 4mo ago
    This is global trade and comparative advantage at work. If someone outside the country can produce an equivalent product to what a local producer would make, they can supply it to our market more efficiently than our local producers, and there are no moral qualms (for example people working under conditions that are unacceptable by our standards) then everyone benefits from the import arrangement except for the local producers who can't compete. From an economic perspective the local producer then needs to become more efficient and/or produce a better product to remain competitive. Alternatively they can do something else that is a more productive use of their time and skills. Again this is just a free market at work. The economic principle is no different if another local producer opened down the road from the existing local producer and they were the ones making the same product cheaper or a better product for the same price. Protectionism arguably has a place. For vital interests like national defence there is an argument for making certain things locally so you have complete control because of the security implications and because the normal rules of international trade and diplomacy might not be working properly at the time when you need those products. But even in fields like defence and strategic infrastructure and perhaps the most obvious example of simply putting enough food on everyone's plate to survive there are few if any Western nations that don't rely significantly on international trade. There is an example I always remember from the Brexit debates here in the UK. The Remain campaigners talked a lot about the advantages of being in the EU's Single Market and Customs Union. (These are the two big economic arrangements in the EU that allow member states to trade freely among themselves without tariffs or non-tariff barriers.) And certainly for intra-EU trade they do offer many economic advantages. However the cost of being under the protectionist umbrella was much less discussed - surprisingly even by Leave campaigners. All member states are required to apply the common EU-based tariffs to anything coming into their country from outside the union. So when the EU introduced extremely high tariffs to protect the fruit growers in its Mediterranean member states that was good for those growers. But we don't exactly grow a lot of citrus fruit in the UK with our milder northern European climate. We also already had some established trade routes with north African nations that could supply similar products at potentially lower cost and would have liked to increase that trade with us - a mutual benefit for both their suppliers and our consumers that would have cost neither of us anything directly. The EU tariffs made that financially unviable and therefore benefitted some of the southern member states but at the expense of both consumers in the UK (also an EU member state at the time!) and the more efficient suppliers from Africa. Protectionism is inherently inefficient economically. Sometimes it might be appropriate for other reasons but in purely financial terms it's almost always a negative effect.
jltsiren 4mo ago
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.
- Chu4eeno 4mo ago
  I don't think you can nicely divide it like that. It seems to be mostly bad individuals, or just individuals with some bad ideas they refuse to give up.
  - dgellow 4mo ago
    Plus the lobby groups that are behind and provide most of the proposal drafting
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - Xelbair 4mo ago
    the problem is that EU has no way for citizens/voters to actually purge those bad individuals.
- tommica 4mo ago
  True, this seems to be Denmarks project
- kmeisthax 4mo ago
  As an extension of this, look at the European Commission's response to the Stop Destroying Videogames[0] petition. It's utter dogshit. The petition is a pure consumer protection issue and the Commission's response is "but we can't touch IP rights". Bullshit, you guys made IP rights, you wrote all the rules surrounding them, and Donald Trump is about to drown you with them because America's tech oligarchs figured out your rulebook better than you knew it. Or, if you think that issue's too niche, look at all the talk of "sovereign clouds". It's almost all "how can we build our own giant polluting AI datacenters" and not "how do we take our data back from the Americans". Because, ultimately, the European Commission is built out of an urge to submit to capital interests. The Epstein class are puppeting the EC in exactly the same way they puppet Donald Trump. If there is any future in the EU, it will start with abolishing the European Commission to take away the capital class's accountability sink. [0] For legal reasons, unrelated to Stop Killing Games, but they work together
constantius 4mo ago
The EU has a lot of upsides, and it's often been a reason to be optimistic about it as a project, but everyobe has a red line beyond which the upsides don't outweigh the downsides, where the slope becomes too slippery to ignore. If Chat Control passes, I think lobbying for the exit of your country is going to become a very justifiable position. Corbyn was famously a Leaver, for the reasons we're observing right now, before aligning his position with his base: a Labour Left UK without the antidemocratic corruption of the EU would arguably have been a better country to live in.
dmitrygr 4mo ago
[flagged]
- sph 4mo ago
  Marie Antoinette didn't have mass surveillance. This is why they're trying to rectify the situation.
  - dmitrygr 4mo ago
    I do not think any amount of surveillance can stop a motivated-enough massive-enough group of citizens interested in having more power over what happens to them. But it will get bloody.
monssooon 4mo ago
Agree. A while ago I met many normies who just complied. Now there is so much legislation that even the normies are starting to ask what is going on. But I guess that of exactly why they now need chat control! To get the herd back to work...
nullorempty 4mo ago
If we agree that politicians are removed from democratic process then there is really no democratic process at all.
marginalia_nu 4mo ago
The EU is going to have to accept this increase in anti-EU sentiment, it will only ever increase as long as the EU has the democratic deficit that it has. It is what's both permitting this overreach, and the powerlessness to do something about it is what is breeding the anti-EU sentiment. The problem begins and ends with the fact that there is just no realistic way to hold these people accountable. I don't know what it would take for people, across the EU, to consider punishing EU politicians to be more important than selecting their national government. A genocide, maybe? Something of that severity, no doubt. Certainly not something as pesky as instating a digital Stasi.

by elric 4mo ago

microtonal 4mo ago

Still, this is mostly pushed by particular countries (e.g. Denmark), the commission and aggressively pursued by lobbyist. The most democratic body in the EU (the EP) has so far always rejected Chat Control. Without the EU, this would have been introduced in some member countries much earlier (see also UK).

elric 4mo ago
Yes, EP has rejected it, and now the president of the EP is ignoring that outcome.
ajsnigrutin 4mo ago
It only has to pass once, and we have to scream about it every goddamn time try try. And they'll try and try again and again.
logicchains 4mo ago
>Without the EU, this would have been introduced in some member countries much earlier (see also UK). And without the EU there'd be some states in which it would never be introduced. Decentralization is what made Europe so successful historically compared to large centralized empires like China and the Ottomans, and the EU is destroying that.
- dgellow 4mo ago
  What you call decentralization and „so successful“ resulted in constant wars and conflicts. Europe would be in a way worse place right now without some form of union like the EU
  - logicchains 4mo ago
    Those constant wars and conflicts were what pushed European countries to develop the military technologies that allowed them to conquer most of the world.
    - dgellow 4mo ago
      Are you defending colonization, or am I misunderstanding you? When you say conquer, I think you mean invade, genocide, enslave, subject most of the world. We also killed each others for the most petty reasons ever instead of working towards a common goal
xinayder 4mo ago
Let it not be forgotten that when Denmark was president of the Council of EU and tried to push this forward, one of the former colleagues/friends of the justice minister was charged with child abuse in 2025. Just search Henrik Sass Larssen and Peter Humeelgaard. We should start digging into the lives of those pushing for mandated age verification, chat control, and other privacy killing measures to show the world their true face. The public deserves to know who exactly is pushing for the "privacy law for kids" agenda.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
Gareth321 4mo ago
I can speak for the sentiment in Denmark: most people are unaware of this legislation. A vocal minority of us (who are a little too online) have been trying to educate people, but I think it feels too esoteric. We had a poll last year which asked, "the ability to detect child abuse is more important than the right to online privacy." 65% of people said yes, 33% said both are equally important, and only 2% said online privacy is more important. The discussion for normal people is often couched in the language of "think of the children." Unfortunately, that appears to be highly effective with the Danes. To be honest, I'm beginning to suspect most people don't care all that much about privacy if you promise them safety.

ajsnigrutin 4mo ago

> 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 value of custom tax? who knows, but you pay it anyway). Add all the money wasting, horrible behaviour of politicians in charge, overpaid MEPs for what they do... it's no wonder people hate everything EU related. All sticks, no carrots.

kubafu 4mo ago
Tell me you don't see the value in the tax as a way of discouraging people from ordering a pair of socks from the other side of the globe, while they can buy them locally?
- Silhouette 4mo ago
  This is global trade and comparative advantage at work. If someone outside the country can produce an equivalent product to what a local producer would make, they can supply it to our market more efficiently than our local producers, and there are no moral qualms (for example people working under conditions that are unacceptable by our standards) then everyone benefits from the import arrangement except for the local producers who can't compete. From an economic perspective the local producer then needs to become more efficient and/or produce a better product to remain competitive. Alternatively they can do something else that is a more productive use of their time and skills. Again this is just a free market at work. The economic principle is no different if another local producer opened down the road from the existing local producer and they were the ones making the same product cheaper or a better product for the same price. Protectionism arguably has a place. For vital interests like national defence there is an argument for making certain things locally so you have complete control because of the security implications and because the normal rules of international trade and diplomacy might not be working properly at the time when you need those products. But even in fields like defence and strategic infrastructure and perhaps the most obvious example of simply putting enough food on everyone's plate to survive there are few if any Western nations that don't rely significantly on international trade. There is an example I always remember from the Brexit debates here in the UK. The Remain campaigners talked a lot about the advantages of being in the EU's Single Market and Customs Union. (These are the two big economic arrangements in the EU that allow member states to trade freely among themselves without tariffs or non-tariff barriers.) And certainly for intra-EU trade they do offer many economic advantages. However the cost of being under the protectionist umbrella was much less discussed - surprisingly even by Leave campaigners. All member states are required to apply the common EU-based tariffs to anything coming into their country from outside the union. So when the EU introduced extremely high tariffs to protect the fruit growers in its Mediterranean member states that was good for those growers. But we don't exactly grow a lot of citrus fruit in the UK with our milder northern European climate. We also already had some established trade routes with north African nations that could supply similar products at potentially lower cost and would have liked to increase that trade with us - a mutual benefit for both their suppliers and our consumers that would have cost neither of us anything directly. The EU tariffs made that financially unviable and therefore benefitted some of the southern member states but at the expense of both consumers in the UK (also an EU member state at the time!) and the more efficient suppliers from Africa. Protectionism is inherently inefficient economically. Sometimes it might be appropriate for other reasons but in purely financial terms it's almost always a negative effect.

jltsiren 4mo ago

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.

Chu4eeno 4mo ago
I don't think you can nicely divide it like that. It seems to be mostly bad individuals, or just individuals with some bad ideas they refuse to give up.
- dgellow 4mo ago
  Plus the lobby groups that are behind and provide most of the proposal drafting
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- Xelbair 4mo ago
  the problem is that EU has no way for citizens/voters to actually purge those bad individuals.
tommica 4mo ago
True, this seems to be Denmarks project
kmeisthax 4mo ago
As an extension of this, look at the European Commission's response to the Stop Destroying Videogames[0] petition. It's utter dogshit. The petition is a pure consumer protection issue and the Commission's response is "but we can't touch IP rights". Bullshit, you guys made IP rights, you wrote all the rules surrounding them, and Donald Trump is about to drown you with them because America's tech oligarchs figured out your rulebook better than you knew it. Or, if you think that issue's too niche, look at all the talk of "sovereign clouds". It's almost all "how can we build our own giant polluting AI datacenters" and not "how do we take our data back from the Americans". Because, ultimately, the European Commission is built out of an urge to submit to capital interests. The Epstein class are puppeting the EC in exactly the same way they puppet Donald Trump. If there is any future in the EU, it will start with abolishing the European Commission to take away the capital class's accountability sink. [0] For legal reasons, unrelated to Stop Killing Games, but they work together

constantius 4mo ago

The EU has a lot of upsides, and it's often been a reason to be optimistic about it as a project, but everyobe has a red line beyond which the upsides don't outweigh the downsides, where the slope becomes too slippery to ignore. If Chat Control passes, I think lobbying for the exit of your country is going to become a very justifiable position. Corbyn was famously a Leaver, for the reasons we're observing right now, before aligning his position with his base: a Labour Left UK without the antidemocratic corruption of the EU would arguably have been a better country to live in.

dmitrygr 4mo ago

[flagged]

sph 4mo ago
Marie Antoinette didn't have mass surveillance. This is why they're trying to rectify the situation.
- dmitrygr 4mo ago
  I do not think any amount of surveillance can stop a motivated-enough massive-enough group of citizens interested in having more power over what happens to them. But it will get bloody.

monssooon 4mo ago

Agree. A while ago I met many normies who just complied. Now there is so much legislation that even the normies are starting to ask what is going on. But I guess that of exactly why they now need chat control! To get the herd back to work...

nullorempty 4mo ago

If we agree that politicians are removed from democratic process then there is really no democratic process at all.

marginalia_nu 4mo ago

The EU is going to have to accept this increase in anti-EU sentiment, it will only ever increase as long as the EU has the democratic deficit that it has. It is what's both permitting this overreach, and the powerlessness to do something about it is what is breeding the anti-EU sentiment. The problem begins and ends with the fact that there is just no realistic way to hold these people accountable. I don't know what it would take for people, across the EU, to consider punishing EU politicians to be more important than selecting their national government. A genocide, maybe? Something of that severity, no doubt. Certainly not something as pesky as instating a digital Stasi.