[mbf1]

If the government can break encryption, so can hackers. If hackers can break your encryption, and my records are being held in it, then your competition will eat your lunch as I move my records to their services.

Either my data is safe from rogue agents and rogue governments or it is not. If encryption is outlawed, only outlaws will use it.

The EU can make as many logical conclusions it wants to, but reality will come back and bite their law enforcement offices that their criminals won't stop using unbreakable encryption.

The difference between theory and practice is greater in practice than it is in theory.

[aflag]

It's not really true that everyone committing a crime will use cryptography. Most people (including criminals) do not care or think about cryptography that much, but the providers of the services and devices they use to commit crimes do think about it. In that way, lawful service providers help haphazard criminals cover their tracks. I believe the idea is to change that, so that lawful service providers will not provide that level of security anymore.

All that being said, obviously countries outside of the EU will continue to allow cryptography. So, unless they create a "great firewall" sensible people (including sensible criminals) will just move elswhere, possibly weakening the EU's presence in the Internet as a whole (which seems like a bad move to me).

[mswann]

Creating a firewall akin to China's is actually seriously considered by the EU [1].

[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2020/6487... (Page 37, section 5.1 "European Cloud / European Internet")