Even living nearby in the UK it blows my mind how quickly the EU proposes, kills and then revives and passes controversial legislation in such a short timeframe.
Well, the impression of speed is mainly in the head of the headline writers.
What has actually happened is that after about three years of faffing about the Council finally decided on it negotiation position begore the Coreper 2 meeting last week, thought it seems they ran put of time at actual the meeting and had to have the formal approval this week.
The Council is only one of three parties that draft new laws, so now there's are still several rounds of negotiations left.
Nothing substantial has happened to the three texts since last week, it's just that "chat control is back" drives traffic and "Council preparatory body formally approves draft position that got consensus previously but didn't formally get passed because people were fighting over Ukraine stuff for too long" doesn't.
1. this wasn't fast, it took ~5 years and most (but not all) of the problematic parts have been removed
2. It also wasn't "fully rejected" or anything in the decision which gained some awareness of hacker news, just one specific draft was rejected, not the proposal as a whole (but IMHO it should have been).
3. it's not passed just approved by the council, which consists of the various head of states elected in their respective countries (i.e. is the easiest part to pass something controversial), but still needs to pass the European parliament (elected through the EU elections)
4. and then it must not be shot down by the ECJ or ECHR, both might shot it down, the ECJ for it being excessive/disproportional, and the ECHR because privacy is accepted as a human right by it (in general, there are exceptions so not 100% guaranteed). Or shut down by the German supreme court (same reason as ECJ and ECHR) which has somewhat of a veto right (or else Germany wouldn't have been able to legally join the EU), idk. if any other countries supreme courts have similar veto rights, but idk. why they shouldn't have)
If you are not really subject to public control and re-election, it makes it much easier.
EU politics don't play much of a role in the media. The older and more cynical I become, the more. I am convinced: that's by design. That way, national politicians can move politically wanted, but publicly unpopular things to Brussels and blame the EU. We are just exposed to that much EU lawmaking news because we are directly affected as a subculture.
During the Brexit referendum days, I learned that British friends of mine did not even know they had EU parliamentary elections - I had to prove to them via Wikipedia AND had to read them the name of their representative (who just so happened to live just down the roar), nor did they care. Made many things more clear to me.
Because it doesn't, people are just embarrassingly ignorant of how the EU legislative process works so when a vote to give first approval to a text is cancelled before it takes place journalists and reddit all over pull out the mission accomplished banners and when a negotiating position is approved everyone has a surprised pikachu face
The "proposal" was made something like 3 years ago, the killing never happened and the passing, if it passes, will happen in at least one year from now because this will definitely take a long time to get through parliament and even longer to get through the trilogue.
TFA mentions "european governments" but this legislation is proposed by a bunch of european members of parliament who in no way represent any governments and much less the commission or the union. In short it tries to depict a group of old farts as an overreaching snooping authority.
I wonder who could have a vested interest in depicting the EU as a repressive regime...
That could be a result of the Parliamentary style system. With multiple parties - each sharing a part of the government - proposals and alliances can shift rapidly. It all depends on how big the pie becomes for each to get a slice
"European Council has no legislative power, it is a strategic (and crisis-solving) body that provides the union with general political directions and priorities, and acts as a collective presidency."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Council
The UK keeps a register of non-crime hate incidents and invests its scarce police resources into harassing, arresting and punishing people for twitter posts.
How they're packaging it now? Terrorism? Child porn? Russian agents?
Either way politicians prefer to push unpopular stuff like this via the EU because the responsibility gets muddied - "we didn't want it, the EU regulation requires us to spy on you!".
It's important to know that the "new" in the title is entirely made up, it's the same draft as last week when they just ran out of time at the meeting, probably because they were fighting about Ukraine stuff.
They've optimized the packaging away. What's left of it now is a recycled paper tag that reads "because", and then if you scrutinize it further, there is poorly printed, barely readable "we're fascists".
This is "Red Queen" concept, constant battle between society and state (Leviathan).
State always drives towards despotism and total control, society always drives to anarchy, and when there's balance, then you have Switzerland, otherwise slide towards Somali or Russia.
The purpose of the state is continuity of the state. The state is always the natural enemy of the people - specifically the liberty and privacy of the people.
Any time you have a government, you will have a government that wishes to spy on you to make sure you will never attempt a competing government/army.
Suddenly it has become normal to scan face in 3D, nonchalantly demand copy of ID and passport, freeze people's money and demand full financial statement arbitrarily. Not only there is no push back but things are becoming more and more restrictive.
Authorities and banks avalanche everyone within their reach over all available communication channels with "warnings" about scams and frauds.
What direction are they aiming with this total control?
Considering that in concert with all of the above a device has been developed that emulates human speech more convincingly than most humans, I guess it's pretty obvious
Yes I experienced this with FastSpring. Had a store with them for 15+ years, then suddenly they froze it and demanded all of the above. Was quite disturbing to say the least.
Partly it's because the Danish have the rotating EU presidency at the moment so they have the job of pushing things forward (which also means receiving the most lobbying). In the previous wave earlier in the year, it was the Polish for the same reason.
Partly it's they don't have the same pro-privacy culture that say Germany and many of the eastern european countries have.
People also think the current Danish PM was also offended by a former prominent Danish politician and cabinet minister who was arrested for CSAM possession.
EU delegates and council members have to report their meetings with lobbyists.
Palantir and Thorn lobbyists (just the most famous ones, but you can add another few dozens security and data companies) are recorded meeting many times with countless of them, including Ursula von der Leyen.
It's really as simple as that, sales pitches convincing them of all the benefits of having more intelligence "to catch criminals (wink)".
My conspiracy theory is because they’d probably give a lot of contracts to Palantir (see the UK giving NHS to Palantir on a silver platter), and the US basically threatening to annex Greenland recently
At this point, it’s clear these sort of measures will go through, if not now but in some foreseeable future. What would be our best bet moving forward? Moving to signal/telegram?
Signal is centralized. So this company operating in EU, under EU laws, will have to do the scanning too.
How they implement it however and when and if at all remains to be seen.
All maybe they will not and EU will block signal.
Maybe they will allow you install apk and Google will block installing from apks directly, basically forcing companies to do the scanning.
And if everybody will do the scanning, maybe they will be sending all of this data to the giant EU server then that will look for 'problematic citizens' like in minority report.
Who knows, but it seems like running your own private chat for your own and your family and friends will be the only way to have some privacy in a few years.
Some decentralized platform with federation abilities. Delta Chat seems promising, but does not support forward secrecy. It is quite interestingly based on plain old email!
It rewards or penalizes online services depending on whether they agree to carry out “voluntary” scanning, effectively making intrusive monitoring a business expectation rather than a legal requirement.
This is the same way the law in many EU countries mandates ISPs to store communication logs for every internet subscriber for months or longer.
The legal mandate was shot down by the EU courts, but every country then figured out their own loophole and as a result data retention is effectively mandatory but not by clear and public law.
Note how they exclude themselves. No privacy for the you only for them. We will all become lawbreakers in the near future as the voluntary aspect is enforced.
this is basically how Chinese social media works - liability for 'problematic' user posted content (ambiguously defined by the govt...) is on the technology platforms themselves, so they inevitably have to scan messages / posts, taking a zero risk policy on whatever content type is proscribed.
Then you're being dishonest. Your intention is to cause a stir instead of to inform (a word related to the word information). Because you are leaving out what she wrote about EP; the EP is, according to her, clearly against this. Why leave that out? What is your agenda? You just disqualified your entire article.
Thank you ChrisArchitect. That story was mysteriously (downranked/downmodded/deranked/downweighted) from the front page.
Perhaps it met the criteria for a Major Ongoing Topic (MOT) or a MegaMOT, or the "flamewar detector" kicked in, or just that it wasn't convenient to discuss, but we'll never know since the precise moderation action applied to individual stories is opaque.
I am a fairly apolitical guy but in light of this I will cast my next votes for the parties that want to leave the EU from now on.
Yes, I know Brexit was a failure and the UK is no better in terms of privacy but there has to be some sort sort of political repercussion for the people who made this possible.
Since there seems to be nothing else to do, then voting to leave is better than the status quo.
I can empathise with this, but I still believe in an economic union in Europe. The EU is flawed beyond and possible reform, but I feel the alternative of a segmented Europe is even crazier to think about
What is also funny is that they are doing that at the same time that they are thinking about relaxing requirements on GDPR and things like that that are really beneficial to the citizens on the pretext to make the regulation easier for "innovation".
This is such a weird sentiment and I see it often when talking about EU politics. Is this just how the European constituency feels? Just like beatdown citizens in a government they have no passion about and no control over?
You can imagine what forms most of the the “pressure” from the government will take, on platforms owned & controlled by large corporations. Hint: it will involve their profit motive.
Also it is not just in Europe —
digital ID is coming in USA starting January. State by state. Thanks to the Republican-dominated supreme court, and of course it is also done in the name of protecting the children:
This is why people will increasingly need open source alternatives, not owned by large corporations, but it needs to be far better than Mastodon and Matrix. People expect the convenience of Instagram and Telegram, and open source will have to match it. That’s why I have spent about $1 million to quietly build https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
It is time to start rolling it out. This is supposed to be the People’s Platform. Anyone who is interested to get involved, find my profile on HN and get in touch by email. Put “hacker news” in the subject, so I can find it among all the bulk email. I would love to hear from people who want to join forces and contribute to something that’s already had about $1M and 10 years of work behind it, something By the People, for the People.
We are welcoming anyone who has skills, some free time, and is looking to actually do something meaningful to help liberate people from what’s coming. Whether you are a developer, want to contact journalists, or just want to promote this in a community. (And to the HN people who like to downvote this kind of stuff… just this once consider that we need to actually _cooperate_ on producing free, open-source alternatives to Big Tech, not do the weird infighting thing.)
Selfishly, part of me hopes this passes, because it will drive high-IQ people to move out of the EU (I highly recommend Armenia), and the EU is a major economic competitor of my own country.
Of all places in the world, Armenia. A country so afraid of its neighbors they would allow Moscow to tell them to do anything. I hope I'm my IQ is not high enough to be included in this proposal.
Edit: Based on the downvotes, you obviously didn't. This is a PROPOSAL, not a LAW. It needs to be voted by the EU Parliament (you know, one of the 3 components of democracy as in "separation of powers").
I have this feeling that I can’t shake off that this is done as the EU political class’ coping mechanism for being absolutely terrified because their whole worldview was shattered overnight:
- Sanctions against Russia backfired (from the EU at least)
- Trump-Vance slapping the EU around in a humiliating fashion (re: that guy that cried at the Munich security council, EU being forced to adopt unfair trade deals with the US)
- look at the body language from Macron, VDL and Xi’s meeting a couple years ago, VDL is being sidelined on purpose, meanwhile Macron given royal treatment
Liberalism is dead, and these career bureaucrats are clinging to any remaining feeling of control:
- they can’t do the antitrust thing because Trump is wagging his finger at them
- they can’t project power externally
- they can’t engage with China (idk why, maybe due to their feeling of superiority)
Don't forget the lobbying. Behind every authoritarian move are a group of companies lobbying for these changes. When you work for law and order, there are only so many customers you can sign, so signing new services is the most reliable way to accomplish growth.
Whoever wins the bid for the (visually hashed) child porn database Whatsapp uses is bound to receive billions of API calls the month the contract goes live. They won't make whatsapp pay for that directly, of course, but I'm sure they'll be "covering operating costs" with government grants to "protect" the public. They get to be rich claiming everyone is a paedophile yet to be caught while pronouncing themselves the foremost fighters against child abuse.
Well obviously they want it, they voted for it. They probably see the situation in terms of something like class war. There are a bunch of people they don't like in society and they want to identify and marginalise them.
As for why politicians turn out this way, they're just pretty ordinary people (often quite impressive people actually, relative to the norm). Most people don't get an opportunity to show off how useless their political principles are because they have no power or influence. That's why there is always a background refrain of "please stop concentrating power to the politicians it ends badly".
Clearly it’s not all of them. Some countries voted against, and even the ones voting in favour had a few people against.
The question is more why do the shit politicians rise to the top. Outside forces (rich people and companies) have too much power and can exert too much influence.
In this case I’m particularly curious about the Danes. They insisted on this more than any other previous attempt. They are forever soiled as fighting against the will of the people.
It's not just the EU. OpenAI doesn't let you use their latest models via API unless you provide your biometric information.
It's all about slowly laying the foundations of a repressive dystopian world.
Why is this even surprising? Mass surveillance is not a new thing. It's been there since the inception of the internet. This only makes it "official" and is nothing more than a formality. We need to fight back by using decentralized and p2p software
As the most "good faith" interpretation, I feel like the only way to do something like this in a remotely not-insane manner with the assumption that there are good reasons where messages must be decrypted would be:
* Each user gets a key to sign a message, there's also one for decryption like E2EE
* The platform owners get a part of a backdoor key for decryption (per message) as well (call it another end in E2EE if you want)
* The feds get a part of a backdoor key for decryption (per message) as well (call it another end in E2EE if you want)
* A watchdog organization also gets a part of a backdoor key for decryption (per message) as well (call it another end in E2EE if you want)
* If the feds want to decrypt something for actual anti-terrorism/anti-CSAM purposes, they convince both the platform owners and the watchdog org that they need keys for specific messages
* The watchdog automatically publishes data like: "Law enforcement agency X accessed message Y decryption key for internal case number Z" (maybe with a bit of delay)
* That way the users who have their messages decrypted can find that out what was accessed eventually
* If the feds are snooping for no good reason or political bullshit reasons, they can get sued
* If the feds are snooping too much (mass surveillance), it'd become obvious too cause you'd see that they're accessing millions of messages and maybe a few percent lead to actual arrests and convictions
* This kinda rests on the assumption that courts would be fair and wouldn't protect corrupt feds
Obviously this would never get implemented, cause the people of any watchdog org could also be corrupted not to publish the data that they should, there's probably numerous issues with backdooring encryption that you can come up with, and in practice it's way easier to implement government overreach by "Oh god, think of the children!" and move towards mass surveillance.
Nothing new under the Sun mate. Look up Clipper Chip.
Further, don't let people here bait you into revealing these types of things for them. Some ideas are just meant to be data dumped/remain forever in silence.
Europe is no longer a place that should be considered ideologically compatible with the United States. At best neutral. The US should abandon NATO and downgrade relations with the continent.
It's all relying on US tech and there is strong lobbying coming from the US for such solution. US has already deployed mass surveillance, major difference is they did it without telling citizens.
Step 1: Allow reckless immigration
Step 2: Terrorism and Insecurity obviously
Step 3: People give up their privacy for security
Step 4: Insecurity continues and government safe regardless
Some comments were deferred for faster rendering.
piker|3 months ago
SiempreViernes|3 months ago
What has actually happened is that after about three years of faffing about the Council finally decided on it negotiation position begore the Coreper 2 meeting last week, thought it seems they ran put of time at actual the meeting and had to have the formal approval this week.
The Council is only one of three parties that draft new laws, so now there's are still several rounds of negotiations left.
Nothing substantial has happened to the three texts since last week, it's just that "chat control is back" drives traffic and "Council preparatory body formally approves draft position that got consensus previously but didn't formally get passed because people were fighting over Ukraine stuff for too long" doesn't.
dathinab|3 months ago
1. this wasn't fast, it took ~5 years and most (but not all) of the problematic parts have been removed
2. It also wasn't "fully rejected" or anything in the decision which gained some awareness of hacker news, just one specific draft was rejected, not the proposal as a whole (but IMHO it should have been).
3. it's not passed just approved by the council, which consists of the various head of states elected in their respective countries (i.e. is the easiest part to pass something controversial), but still needs to pass the European parliament (elected through the EU elections)
4. and then it must not be shot down by the ECJ or ECHR, both might shot it down, the ECJ for it being excessive/disproportional, and the ECHR because privacy is accepted as a human right by it (in general, there are exceptions so not 100% guaranteed). Or shut down by the German supreme court (same reason as ECJ and ECHR) which has somewhat of a veto right (or else Germany wouldn't have been able to legally join the EU), idk. if any other countries supreme courts have similar veto rights, but idk. why they shouldn't have)
RobotToaster|3 months ago
iLoveOncall|3 months ago
I'm not sure how you can have already forgotten the fact that we have to upload or face or ID to access websites.
DocTomoe|3 months ago
EU politics don't play much of a role in the media. The older and more cynical I become, the more. I am convinced: that's by design. That way, national politicians can move politically wanted, but publicly unpopular things to Brussels and blame the EU. We are just exposed to that much EU lawmaking news because we are directly affected as a subculture.
During the Brexit referendum days, I learned that British friends of mine did not even know they had EU parliamentary elections - I had to prove to them via Wikipedia AND had to read them the name of their representative (who just so happened to live just down the roar), nor did they care. Made many things more clear to me.
arlort|3 months ago
The "proposal" was made something like 3 years ago, the killing never happened and the passing, if it passes, will happen in at least one year from now because this will definitely take a long time to get through parliament and even longer to get through the trilogue.
The process is many things but quick it is not
genericacct|3 months ago
I wonder who could have a vested interest in depicting the EU as a repressive regime...
Simulacra|3 months ago
surgical_fire|3 months ago
It did not pass.
I think the problem here is that you don't understand how the system works.
The EU parliament still would have to approve this for it to become legislation.
This is akin to a national government proposing a law, and the congress having to vote for it.
Account_Removed|3 months ago
paganel|3 months ago
Traubenfuchs|3 months ago
margorczynski|3 months ago
Either way politicians prefer to push unpopular stuff like this via the EU because the responsibility gets muddied - "we didn't want it, the EU regulation requires us to spy on you!".
SiempreViernes|3 months ago
sebtron|3 months ago
This, the article says so in the first paragraph. The bullshit justification hasn't change in the last couple of years afaik.
unknown|3 months ago
[deleted]
falcor84|3 months ago
wartywhoa23|3 months ago
casenmgreen|3 months ago
You defeat them one day, but they're still there, and they keep trying, day after day after day.
stackedinserter|3 months ago
State always drives towards despotism and total control, society always drives to anarchy, and when there's balance, then you have Switzerland, otherwise slide towards Somali or Russia.
https://news.mit.edu/2019/narrow-corridor-acemoglu-liberty-0...
sneak|3 months ago
Any time you have a government, you will have a government that wishes to spy on you to make sure you will never attempt a competing government/army.
unknown|3 months ago
[deleted]
throw20251127|3 months ago
[deleted]
lifestyleguru|3 months ago
Authorities and banks avalanche everyone within their reach over all available communication channels with "warnings" about scams and frauds.
What direction are they aiming with this total control?
balamatom|3 months ago
crimsonnoodle58|3 months ago
duxup|3 months ago
permo-w|3 months ago
Macha|3 months ago
Partly it's they don't have the same pro-privacy culture that say Germany and many of the eastern european countries have.
People also think the current Danish PM was also offended by a former prominent Danish politician and cabinet minister who was arrested for CSAM possession.
epolanski|3 months ago
EU delegates and council members have to report their meetings with lobbyists.
Palantir and Thorn lobbyists (just the most famous ones, but you can add another few dozens security and data companies) are recorded meeting many times with countless of them, including Ursula von der Leyen.
It's really as simple as that, sales pitches convincing them of all the benefits of having more intelligence "to catch criminals (wink)".
arlort|3 months ago
It's currently held by Denmark so it's the Danish delegation that's mostly doing the brokering etc for this semester
sillyfluke|3 months ago
ggm|3 months ago
budududuroiu|3 months ago
tasoeur|3 months ago
npodbielski|3 months ago
And if everybody will do the scanning, maybe they will be sending all of this data to the giant EU server then that will look for 'problematic citizens' like in minority report.
Who knows, but it seems like running your own private chat for your own and your family and friends will be the only way to have some privacy in a few years.
apopapo|3 months ago
xyzal|3 months ago
Or Matrix? No experience with it though
triceratops|3 months ago
martin82|3 months ago
throw20251127|3 months ago
[deleted]
AndrewSwift|3 months ago
It rewards or penalizes online services depending on whether they agree to carry out “voluntary” scanning, effectively making intrusive monitoring a business expectation rather than a legal requirement.
jeroenhd|3 months ago
The legal mandate was shot down by the EU courts, but every country then figured out their own loophole and as a result data retention is effectively mandatory but not by clear and public law.
snvzz|3 months ago
The (actual) solution should be to fix legislation to adequate protect privacy, because they'll attack this next.
But meantime, a technical solution is better than nothing.
0. https://tox.chat/
1. https://simplex.chat/
npodbielski|3 months ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
raverbashing|3 months ago
But people like to sensationalize stuff
This is less worse than the original proposal
Oh and honestly game chat rooms should not be private.
(of course personal 1:1 messages should)
christkv|3 months ago
whywhywhywhy|3 months ago
preisschild|3 months ago
hunglee2|3 months ago
MangoToupe|3 months ago
[deleted]
Fnoord|3 months ago
> Czech MEP Markéta Gregorová called the Council’s position “a disappointment…Chat Control…opens the way to blanket scanning of our messages.”
From this translation:
https://reclaimthenet.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/CnZOD1F...
Then you're being dishonest. Your intention is to cause a stir instead of to inform (a word related to the word information). Because you are leaving out what she wrote about EP; the EP is, according to her, clearly against this. Why leave that out? What is your agenda? You just disqualified your entire article.
mrtksn|3 months ago
dupedupedupe|3 months ago
Perhaps it met the criteria for a Major Ongoing Topic (MOT) or a MegaMOT, or the "flamewar detector" kicked in, or just that it wasn't convenient to discuss, but we'll never know since the precise moderation action applied to individual stories is opaque.
https://hnrankings.info/46062777/
rdm_blackhole|3 months ago
Yes, I know Brexit was a failure and the UK is no better in terms of privacy but there has to be some sort sort of political repercussion for the people who made this possible.
Since there seems to be nothing else to do, then voting to leave is better than the status quo.
budududuroiu|3 months ago
preisschild|3 months ago
Frieren|3 months ago
You say that you are apolitical, but you sound like an extremist. What should I believe, what you say you are or what you actually do?
greatgib|3 months ago
unknown|3 months ago
[deleted]
hoppp|3 months ago
pas|3 months ago
the requirement to backdoor e2e was dropped, and who knows what will eventually remain of the reporting requirements, etc.
of course if a company is processing unencrypted images they might be required to use some service to flag them
...
will we end up in yet another false positive flood? who knows
squigz|3 months ago
Do you think Meta, Google and them are not scanning every bit of data hosted on their servers to ensure they're not hosting things they don't want to?
Do you think they don't cooperate with governments to share those findings?
I don't disagree that this push is silly, ineffective, and bad for democracy. We should fight it and fight for the right to privacy.
However, people are acting like we have privacy right now. What evidence is there for that?
petcat|3 months ago
It is not direct state imposed laws requiring you to be scanned wherever you are and every service you are using (including ones you built yourself)
VWWHFSfQ|3 months ago
throaway54|3 months ago
r_lee|3 months ago
pjmlp|3 months ago
EGreg|3 months ago
Also it is not just in Europe — digital ID is coming in USA starting January. State by state. Thanks to the Republican-dominated supreme court, and of course it is also done in the name of protecting the children:
https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2025/07/dangerous-us-su...
This “papers, please” is now happening quickly all around the world. Here we maintain the updates:
https://community.qbix.com/t/the-global-war-on-end-to-end-en...
This is why people will increasingly need open source alternatives, not owned by large corporations, but it needs to be far better than Mastodon and Matrix. People expect the convenience of Instagram and Telegram, and open source will have to match it. That’s why I have spent about $1 million to quietly build https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
It is time to start rolling it out. This is supposed to be the People’s Platform. Anyone who is interested to get involved, find my profile on HN and get in touch by email. Put “hacker news” in the subject, so I can find it among all the bulk email. I would love to hear from people who want to join forces and contribute to something that’s already had about $1M and 10 years of work behind it, something By the People, for the People.
We are welcoming anyone who has skills, some free time, and is looking to actually do something meaningful to help liberate people from what’s coming. Whether you are a developer, want to contact journalists, or just want to promote this in a community. (And to the HN people who like to downvote this kind of stuff… just this once consider that we need to actually _cooperate_ on producing free, open-source alternatives to Big Tech, not do the weird infighting thing.)
baal80spam|3 months ago
phendrenad2|3 months ago
redleader55|3 months ago
asgr|3 months ago
mixxit|3 months ago
glemmaPaul|3 months ago
oblio|3 months ago
Edit: Based on the downvotes, you obviously didn't. This is a PROPOSAL, not a LAW. It needs to be voted by the EU Parliament (you know, one of the 3 components of democracy as in "separation of powers").
turbonegrofa|3 months ago
[deleted]
budududuroiu|3 months ago
- Sanctions against Russia backfired (from the EU at least)
- Trump-Vance slapping the EU around in a humiliating fashion (re: that guy that cried at the Munich security council, EU being forced to adopt unfair trade deals with the US)
- look at the body language from Macron, VDL and Xi’s meeting a couple years ago, VDL is being sidelined on purpose, meanwhile Macron given royal treatment
Liberalism is dead, and these career bureaucrats are clinging to any remaining feeling of control:
- they can’t do the antitrust thing because Trump is wagging his finger at them
- they can’t project power externally
- they can’t engage with China (idk why, maybe due to their feeling of superiority)
… so they resort to projecting power internally
pixelpoet|3 months ago
Nobody wants this, including they themselves, which is why they specifically exempt themselves from it.
jeroenhd|3 months ago
Whoever wins the bid for the (visually hashed) child porn database Whatsapp uses is bound to receive billions of API calls the month the contract goes live. They won't make whatsapp pay for that directly, of course, but I'm sure they'll be "covering operating costs" with government grants to "protect" the public. They get to be rich claiming everyone is a paedophile yet to be caught while pronouncing themselves the foremost fighters against child abuse.
roenxi|3 months ago
As for why politicians turn out this way, they're just pretty ordinary people (often quite impressive people actually, relative to the norm). Most people don't get an opportunity to show off how useless their political principles are because they have no power or influence. That's why there is always a background refrain of "please stop concentrating power to the politicians it ends badly".
latexr|3 months ago
The question is more why do the shit politicians rise to the top. Outside forces (rich people and companies) have too much power and can exert too much influence.
In this case I’m particularly curious about the Danes. They insisted on this more than any other previous attempt. They are forever soiled as fighting against the will of the people.
Havoc|3 months ago
setnone|3 months ago
usrnm|3 months ago
balamatom|3 months ago
So that you can blame them for your problems.
josefritzishere|3 months ago
okokwhatever|3 months ago
r33b33|3 months ago
okokwhatever|3 months ago
pcdoodle|3 months ago
[deleted]
jason-richar15|3 months ago
[deleted]
ax0ar|3 months ago
MiddleEndian|3 months ago
stingraycharles|3 months ago
udev4096|3 months ago
KronisLV|3 months ago
salawat|3 months ago
Further, don't let people here bait you into revealing these types of things for them. Some ideas are just meant to be data dumped/remain forever in silence.
pfdietz|3 months ago
hnarn|3 months ago
cryptonym|3 months ago
stackedinserter|3 months ago
E.g. what do Spain and Poland have in common?
unknown|3 months ago
[deleted]
vezycash|3 months ago