[blfr]

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.

[graemep]

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]

Yes, I know they've been pushing for this when they're pretty reasonable and independent on other issues. How come?

[wqaatwt]

Ar they, though? The established longterm consensus is pretty reasonable in the EU, it’s not self evident that things have been going in the right direction on the whole in recent years.

[mantas]

Is it?

The green deal stuff seems to be pretty bad. Manufacturing seems to have a hard time. The next tier economy, e.g. AI, is not seen on the horizon. Over-the-top regulations for agriculture and then opening up the market from goods where such regulations don't exist does not seem smart either.

And there're lots and lots of small things like those.

[tokai]

I'm completely serious here; the former minister of law was beaten as a child and it informs his whole world view.

[graemep]

That can make a lot of sense. People do tent to put too much value on their own experience - there is a tendency to think your experiences are normal.

[sph]

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]

How would members of the EP benefit from Chat Control?

[sph]

They would be exempt, along with military and intelligence personnel. So they can enact mass surveillance, stop any form of dissent before it has a chance to grow, while themselves remaining above the law.

https://europeanpirates.eu/chatcontrol-eu-ministers-want-to-...

[freehorse]

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.

[wqaatwt]

Some sort of perverse inclinations of controlling other people’s lives and knowing what’s “better” for them. Delusional and narcissistic people seem to be generally significantly over represented in politics (another demographic is useful idiots, put those two together and well..)

[yownie]

https://privatecitizen.press/episode/160/

[dgellow]

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

[iamnothere]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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-po...

[iamnothere]

Sounds like you would know more on this, then, I had heard that there was a link between Chat Control and migration. I was also unfamiliar with Denmark’s long history of surveillance, as I’d literally never heard of this being an issue there until recently—but I do not live there. Thank you for the correction.

[Gareth321]

Dane here, I don't think there is much of a link. The government is usually pragmatic about security, and has long leaned into technology to achieve it.

[GTP]

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]

>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?

[munksbeer]

> Would you still believe this if Chat Control got though?

Chat Control is being pushed by member states. The people who keep saving you are the MEPs (elected EU MPs).

You would most likely already have chat control if you were not in the EU. All governments around the world are pushing for this.

[Krssst]

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)

[GTP]

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.

[enedil]

> 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]

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]

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]

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.

[EdiX]

"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.

[tmtvl]

> 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]

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?)

[consensus1]

All of those are either illegal already (scams) or easily avoidable without regulation.

[basisword]

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]

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]

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.

[anonzzzies]

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.

[microgpt]

Realistically you won't be caught analyzing server-side logs of things the client is doing anyway, even if you don't follow GDPR rules with those logs. But they want Google Analytics, right?

[dgellow]

Most of them don’t care and just integrate whatever is the most common cookie banner widget because their legal team asked them to

[sensanaty]

The solution to that one is pretty simple, simply don't collect information you don't need, and you can avoid the banner altogether! Github manages to not have banners, it's not because of magic.

[goobatrooba]

There is no obligation to put a banner of you don't sell your users' data to third parties. The law is very clear that your don't need it for period technical cookies, so it's really always and every time solely about tracking and advertisement money.

[ajsnigrutin]

99% of the people just click accept and go through.

This could be solved on the client side, by requiring all devices with browsers sold in EU to have separate cookie jars per domain and by default those cookies would be deleted on window/tab close. If you wanted to stay logged in to a site, you'd click a button next to the url bar that says "keep cookies for this domain", and be done.

[sensanaty]

Cookies have literally nothing to do with GDPR or the ePrivacy directive. It is mentioned I think twice total in both documents as an example of how user data is persisted and tracked across domains, but ultimately the mechanism is irrelevant.

[grayhatter]

So you like the law, but don't like how it didn't actually solve the problem it was trying to solve?

I assume you're pretty well read up on matters of privacy, right? So you have a better awareness and understanding. But do you believe the average person does? Or would you assume that the average person has either been trained to ignore the banner, automatically consent to more invasive tracking, or is generally more confused about why the banner exists, or what it does?

The cookie consent law is the dumbest application of an attempt to improve privacy. It's made the internet worse, and is being used to train people into consenting to giving away their privacy without thinking... because: "clicking accept is what you have to do to use the page" -- every normal person casually browsing any site.

No implementation for cookie based consent can be done correctly.

Personally, I'd love to see a law that makes any/all dark patterns a crime, and empowers state prosecutors via grand jury to bring charges for them against both the company, and individual authors of the specific commits as jointly responsible. I don't want statutory laws, I want a trial jury to look at it, and decide if any technological measure, pattern, tactic, procedure, design, or measurement was used to encourage one decision over the other instead of a fair choice.

I don't want a set of rules that given enough funding any company is able to win as a negative sum game. I want a jury, not a trailing clause, to decide if the company is clearly acting in good faith or worthy of apocalyptic fines.

[ezst]

> 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]

At least there’s free speech and people are not arrested for mean memes (as is the case in UK and Germany). Burning bridges with “allies” which were taking advantage of you?

[drawfloat]

Didn't we just have a round of people being fired and arrested in the US for saying mean things about Charlie Kirk?

[tokioyoyo]

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.

[tough]

as long as your mean memes aren't against the POTUS ;)

[pbkompasz]

And at least people are not shot in the streets by the police for protesting...

[vjjsejj]

Well no.. just handcuffed and left to die after being stabbed (while the perpetrators face no consequences).

[watwut]

Europe is over all far more democratic and safer then USA. Including people actually being safer when they speak.

[tmtvl]

> free speech

Democracy only works well when the populace is properly informed and it's much easier for someone to tell a lie than for someone else to disprove that lie. Think of the Alex Jones Sandy Hook hoax conspiracy hypothesis.

[thrance]

A group of protesters got 50 years in jail for daring to exercise their constitutional duty against ICE illegally detaining citizens. Meanwhile the J6 thugs all got pardonned by the literal pedophile in office, and not a single Epstein victim got any justice.

[tokai]

Right now people in the US are being designated as terrorist for being against the government.

[dgellow]

And people are literally arrested for touching a pool

[bluecalm]

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.

[blfr]

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.

[josmar]

Only Switzerland has a true democracy

[dgellow]

We also have representatives. We call it semi-direct democratic system. There is no such thing as a „true democracy“, it’s a set of principles

[basisword]

>> 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]

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.

[gib444]

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

[spacebanana7]

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.

[nxm]

Dear lord… thanks to EU regs, you’re already behind in tech and giving up more and more ground to China in manufacturing (see planned VW job cuts just this week)

[rockinghigh]

The US is also falling behind Chinese manufacturing. They had to ban Chinese cars because legacy American automakers couldn't compete.

[Chu4eeno]

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]

do you have an original talking point somewhere in this drivel that doesn't sound like it's written by a 15 year old edgelord?

[m4nu3l]

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]

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]

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]

> 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.

[wqaatwt]

> simply amended as soon as such a standard emerges

That statement just makes no sense. How can a new standard emerge when legally there is no option to validate its actually superior in the market?

> figures out something better

That’s not how it works. Most innovation does not occur in committees but through trial and error.

[m4nu3l]

> I don't have this particular problem, so it doesn't exist!

No, what I said is that you could find devices with USB-C in all the categories that are now regulated. This means it was pretty easy to find devices like that if you really valued USB-C. Of course, if you wanted an iPhone but you liked USB-C, you would have had a problem. A problem that is much less worse than blocking progress.

> 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.

You totally ignored what I wrote, or you didn't understand it. No standard can emerge if you can't test it on the market. You can have a bureaucrat choose the next one from some proposal. It's not the same.

[GTP]

You might have a point. But, at the same time, AFAIK the only manufacturer that complained about USB-C (and, coincidentally, making the exact same argument as you're making) was Apple. And they definitely weren't interested in making the lightning connector an industry standard. Quite the opposite.