[elric]

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.

[jltsiren]

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.

[egorfine]

Doesn't matter because Apple will happily implement messages scanning immediately and eagerly. And despite let's say Poland not implementing the bill, all iPhones in Poland will snitch on their owners. Tim Cook's Apple is not Steve Jobs' Apple.

Case in point: my new Mac purchased in Switzerland and activated in Poland on my US Apple account required me to provide my age in the setup assistant. Neither Poland nor Switzerland or the US have this stupid law. Yet Apple is already doing it's part to eliminate my privacy.

[dgellow]

Could you clarify what you mean by „required me to provide my age in the setup assistant“? Was is actually required, or optional? Dont they already have your age associated with your iCloud account, or were you creating a new one? Without more details I’m pretty skeptical there is something nefarious here

[egorfine]

It was a required step in the setup assistant.

I was trying to setup this Mac with NO iCloud account thus it could not deduct my age from the account.

[theshrike79]

And you think Google or Samsung will fight tooth and nail against EU not to implement it?

[egorfine]

No, absolutely not. From those two I expect even more overcompliance.

[Xelbair]

which speaks volumes about either EU overstepping it's bounds as an entity, or is severely lacking checks and balances.

[Chu4eeno]

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.

[Xelbair]

the problem is that EU has no way for citizens/voters to actually purge those bad individuals.

[dgellow]

Plus the lobby groups that are behind and provide most of the proposal drafting

[constantius]

The issue is that the outcome is the same: whether the Parliament is made up of angels or not, the dealings of the Commission and Council affect the Member States anyway.

[munksbeer]

The Council is the member states.

The Commission are their appointed civil service and work on whatever agenda is set by the Council (the member states).

Almost everything people complain about coming out of "the EU" originates in the national elected governments.

About the only ones actually protecting the people of the MEPs (the elected EU MPs). They keep shutting this sort of stuff down, and then some member state (mostly Denmark it seems) finds a way to resurrect it again, and again, and again. They only need to succeed once.

[tommica]

True, this seems to be Denmarks project

[cyanydeez]

Also, don't forget the foreign propagandists who absolutely hate democracy, and have toppled both Britain and America.

That seems to always be "forgotten" about how the internet is acting as a accelerationist far right platform.

[kmeisthax]

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

[onraglanroad]

Abolishing the European Commission would be seen as an attack on the individual countries' sovereignty as it would give more power to the EU.

[consensus1]

Well of course it's about building data centers. There are exactly 3 options for you:

1. use "giant polluting AI data centers" in the US or China

2. build "giant polluting AI data centers" in the EU

3. do without modern technology

Option 1 fails at "how do we take our data back from the Americans" and option 3 is insanity and will fail at the ballot box. So get ready for option 2.

[constantius]

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.

[microtonal]

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).

[xinayder]

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.

[elric]

Yes, EP has rejected it, and now the president of the EP is ignoring that outcome.

[Gareth321]

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]

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]

>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]

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

[dmitrygr]

> no politician is ever going to experience any negative consequences

They do eventually. Ask Marie Antoinette.

[ajsnigrutin]

> 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.

[mcv]

There's the lack of customs charges for items from other European countries. The common market is a really big advantage. There's the Euro, and in the past, the EU did a fairly decent job at holding large corporations accountable, although that seems to have disappeared with Neelie Kroes' retirement.

And of course the lack of borders. Being able to go on vacation with no trouble is massive. Do we really want those border checks back?

[wqaatwt]

You didn’t need the EU for the removal of trade barriers and the common market. Both were established quite a while before the EU as we know it now became a thing in the 90s.

> we really want those border checks back

Why? You don’t need to be in the EU to belong to Shengen.

[GTP]

The European Union is actually an union of treaties, with countries that sign some and not others. So here you would need to be more specific.

[wqaatwt]

That used to be the case. i.e. if imposing Chat Control on all countries would have required a treaty it would hardly have any chances. However national governments have delegated the right to EU institutions to impose mandatory regulations. You can’t pick and chose anymore.

[Chu4eeno]

Not really.

Norway is not EU, it's EEA, which is more like what you describe (the population rejected joining twice in referendums, but the politicians still wanted some treaties).

[tough]

Why one couldn't have all these without the EU ?

[gpvos]

To hold large corps accountable you need clout, and the individual countries don't have that.

[ajsnigrutin]

The custom thing started from basically the beginning of eu, this wasn't done in the last decades, but the customs chargers for outside stuff have been increased by the EU. The large corporations are not reall accountable, Volkswagen screwed up, americans got buyback programms, hyundai/kia screwed up, americans got gas cards... intel scews up (spectre, no hyperthreading to keep safe), europeans get nothing. And yes, there are border checks within EU, just had to show my ID yesterday on the slovenia-austria border.

[kubafu]

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?

[jvuygbbkuurx]

Why let a middleman rentseek?

[d1sxeyes]

It’s not a “middleman rent seeking”, it’s protectionism. If lower cost production is available elsewhere in the world, there are three options.

1. Stop producing locally. Allow the market to take care of it.

2. Deregulate minimum wages to allow local businesses to price locally produced goods competitively.

3. Impose a tariff on incoming goods to protect local producers.

Which is your preference?

[mantas]

Market has already did the thing. In this case it's protecting local retailers who import in bulk over consumers importing individually.

[tiahura]

Where is the rentseeking in that example? Rentseeking is the expenditure of resources to influence the rules so you can charge rent. The sock merchant in the example isn’t.

[kmeisthax]

There are two levels of rentseeking in any tariff example.

The first level is the intended rentseeking: we make imported socks from China more expensive so you buy domestically made socks instead. There are various excusable reasons why you would want to do this, but at the end of the day, we are still assigning the class of people who make socks domestically the ability to charge a supra-competitive price, which is a rent.

The second level is unintended rentseeking. Maybe it turns out the economy really, really doesn't want to fund a domestic sock industry. Maybe our sockmakers are just really, really bad at making socks. Or maybe people really, really want foreign socks. In any of these cases, the people just pay the tariff no matter the cost.

For example, Brazil has had extraordinarily high import tariffs on all sorts of consumer electronics. The intent is to create a domestic electronics industry. The reality is, however, Brazil was never going to be able to support that. Electronics are a highly exportable industry and the global market can only support a few countries being involved in it. So the result is that game consoles and smartphones are just really expensive purely for the benefit of people involved in the tax scheme.

[Silhouette]

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.

[ajsnigrutin]

Because we don't make those socks locally. They come from the other side of the globe.

For example, i want to buy a phone case... i can order one on aliexpress for ~1eur (free shipping) + 3eur tax + 88cents of vat and pay 4.88for it.

Or I can go to my local mall, and buy the identical case, made by the same chinese manufacturer for 12-15eur. The middleman can order 100 of those cases and since they're the same TARIC code, he'll still just pay 3eur (total) in customs for all of them (3% customs, instead of 300% if you order 1 piece only) and still be much more expensive than if I order directly from china.

So instead of paying 1eur + having 4 eur left over to go for a beer, i now pay almost 5eur, no local beer and 75% of that tax doesn't even go to my country but directly into EU budget. I can afford less and won't get anything out of that money. Yes, there's an employee in that cell phone store, but so is there an employee in my local bar where I can't afford beer anymore because EU took my money.

[gherkinnn]

What have the Romans ever done for us?

[9dev]

Are you kidding me..? The freedom of movement across all member states, including the right to settle and start a business anywhere you like, that's not a "good regulation" to you? Being able to pay in all of those states without paying FX rates, bringing home your purchases across the border without tolls or even checkpoints no less? The funding of a massive amount of public benefit projects in poorer member states, including art and artists, public health and education, infrastructure - all of that isn't worth anything? The ability to trust everything you buy to be safe, from child toys to food to cars? This list goes on for a long time.

Many politicians have used the EU as a convenient scapegoat for inconvenient decisions, and people like you continue to spread completely uninformed FUD.

Let's even put aside all the benefits you have but apparently either don't know or don't care about. How well do you think your home country would fare against the USA or China or Russia on its own? The only weapon all of us have against the big power blocks of the world is being a power block on our own.

The EU isn't perfect, and I'm absolutely opposed to the Chat Control bullshit in its entirety, but don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

[consensus1]

I think he is saying all those beneficial things could be done by multilateral agreements without the need for the additional layer of EU organization and bureaucracy. In fact some of them already have been done that way.

[logicchains]

>The freedom of movement across all member states, including the right to settle and start a business anywhere you like, that's not a "good regulation" to you

That's not regulation, that's a reduction in regulation.

[9dev]

That’s a reduction in prohibitions, not regulation. You cannot enable this without regulating how it works.

[Sharlin]

> even if it's a 1eur phone case (1eur + 3eur customs +

That's the fucking point for fuck's sake! Pardon my language, but the entire point of the tariff is to stop people from buying masses of trivial things from the other side of the world, with all the externalities that it entails. This tariff tries to cover at least some fraction of said externalities.

People on HN should not be this clueless about basic economy. This tariff is one of the good things that the EU has done lately, but unfortunately it won't be popular among the common folk who just want their cheap unsustainable stuff without having to think about the consequences.

[ondra]

This is obviously not the point if the surcharge disappears on packages with total price over 150 €.

[sunaookami]

When Trump introduced tariffs everyone screamed but now the EU does EXACTLY the same and suddenly it's okay.

[xienze]

> That's the fucking point for fuck's sake! Pardon my language, but the entire point of the tariff is to stop people from buying masses of trivial things from the other side of the world, with all the externalities that it entails. This tariff tries to cover at least some fraction of said externalities.

Boy, when you put it that way it makes me wonder why people didn't appreciate the genius of Trump's tarrifs.