Lack of majority thanks to severe pushback puts the proposal on hold.
According to Netzpolitik (German), “The EU Council did not make a decision on chat control today, as the agenda item was removed due to the lack of a majority, confirmed by Council and member state spokespersons”.
Great news. I am relieved. Though we have to continue spread the world to have a stronger opposition, with protests and everything, next time. It is Germany firm opposition that killed it, but mainly because of bad optics. This proposal will come again in a few months, and we will stand ready!
Apologies if this is a daft question, but if this does ever get passed and become EU law, what is to stop a person in the EU from using a VPN to open an account with an email/chat provider outside of the EU that uses E2E encryption?
This is great news! Even though it is not fully off the table yet, we have more time to raise awareness. I am curious what Hungary’s stance is on chat control. They’re very euroskeptic, so I wonder if they would want the EU to spy on everyone’s chat messages.
The German article does state (translated):
Hungary has announced in its work program that it will push ahead with negotiations on chat control.
So, that seems like unfortunate news. The only relevant part I see in their program at a glance is this, which I assume is referring to Chat Control:
Organised cybercrime is a major threat to fundamental rights, critical infrastructure, and competitiveness. The Presidency pays particular attention to providing a safe environment for children, both offline and online. Our Presidency will continue to work on developing a long-term legislative solution to prevent and combat online child sexual abuse and on the revision of the directive against sexual exploitation of children.
Nothing, normally you shouldn’t even use a VPN, although more authoritarian member states could actually ban Signal servers, most can’t by Constitution or because they know the European court of Human Rights (unrelated to EU, almost all European states are under it’s authority) ruled this is illegal.
But what will certainly happen is deplatforming, which will mean 99% will not be able to download the app. You cant speak alone.
Don’t even ask this. You won’t want to know. I lived in Russia and people there continuously asked for years those questions: how they will know? How they will block it? And made statements like “okay, I will just use my personal VPN”, “i will just use Tor”, etc.
Now we at the point when hundred of thousands (if not millions) Russians flew away, there is wartime censorship, propaganda is litelly everythere (especially in the Internet) and people are scary to hit a fucking “Like” button, because you can go to prison for that.
It’s day and night. 10 years ago Russian internet was as good as in EU or US and now I am seeing as the iron curtain is closing in front of my eyes.
There is no good government, they always want to constrain people, so believe me you don’t even want to know how they will restrict you, they will just always find a way to do it.
So for sure this is excellent news.
I get that, I really do.
This is actually not great news (except for the very moment) - they didn’t withdraw the vote because they somehow, magically, finally understood how bad Chat Control is but because they saw they could not win this time.
Prepare for another try in a new disguise, soon™.
If a bill’s main selling point is “Think of the children!”, it almost certainly doesn’t give 2 cents about children.
[…] they didn’t withdraw the vote because they somehow, magically, finally understood how bad Chat Control is but because they saw they could not win this time.
Yep! Unfortunately it’s not gone, but already part of the agenda for a planned meeting in December: https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-11222-2024-INIT/en/pdf#page=30
Page 27 of the PDF. What does “Progress report” even means ?
They are working on revisions that they hope will allow it to gain approval of those which are currently against or undecided. So they would be reporting on progress towards that goal.
Potentially this could mean watering it down just enough to get something passed, and then once that is in place they can work on future additions. For example, this is how “Chat Control 1.0” got passed (it’s voluntary and doesn’t cover E2EE services). Ever since someone came up with the idea of “client side scanning”, there has been a push (not just in the EU) to make this mandatory - they see it as a way to claim that end-to-end encryption is preserved, while actually it just randomly uploads samples of your data to third parties, and is trivial to bypass (in other words, it will target primarily the communications of innocent people, while criminals sharing actual illegal content can trivially evade detection).
The push for client-side scanning is coming largely from the tech companies that have written the software to do it, and the people they have engaged to promote it to politicians and policy makers: https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the-eus-fight-over-scanning-for-child-sex-content/
Apple had previously tried to roll out their own client-side scanning tech, but cancelled their plans: Apple finally admits the CSAM scanning flaw we all pointed out
The sad thing is that these half-baked proposals are simply land grabs by tech companies, and divert attention and resources away from actually combatting the problems they pretend to be fixing.
For context, the vote in favor represented 63.7 percent of the EU population. To get the proposal approved, 65 percent is needed.
They’re going to try and “fine-tune” it now in order to pass the bill. They just need one more country…
Sources (in Dutch):
The good thing is that if/when Hungary push the proposal it will get more attention since it is an “authoritarian” country (compared to Liberal democracies).
I am not sure how much this proposal can be waterdowned.
France’s RN victory might wake up other countries, like Belgium…