> Despite today’s victory, further procedural steps by EU governments cannot be completely ruled out. Most of all, the trilogue negotiations on a permanent child protection regulation (Chat Control 2.0) are continuing under severe time pressure. There, too, EU governments continue to insist on their demand for “voluntary” indiscriminate Chat Control.
> Furthermore, the next massive threat to digital civil liberties is already on the agenda: Next up in the ongoing trilogue, lawmakers will negotiate whether messenger and chat services, as well as app stores, will be legally obliged to implement age verification. This would require users to provide ID documents or submit to facial scans, effectively making anonymous communication impossible and severely endangering vulnerable groups such as whistleblowers and persecuted individuals.
I think this article [0] discussed here [1] is much more informative, and I suggest merging the current comment thread there [1].
I am not sure of the logic of the amendment, as parties voted differently between proposals (eg left parties voted for the amendment and against the whole, and EPP voted against both, S&D voted in favour of both). In any case, one vote difference for the amendment is not really the point, the actual vote for the whole is what mattered, and this gained a more clear majority against chat control [2].
Not sure if this is higher because it is more "clickbait" (chat control 1.0) or what, but it is a single tweet with a screenshot and no context, imho HN can do better than this.
[0] https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/end-of-chat-control-eu-parl...
EPP wanted indiscriminate scanning instead, not targeted one (the goal of the amendments).
A more limited bill takes off the pressure to "do something", and therefore makes the more extreme bill harder to pass later.
In this case there is reason to suspect that the real goal of the bill is not catching pedophiles. Instead it is to give police broader powers of surveillance in the name of catching pedophiles, which they will then be able to use for other purposes. This is particularly problematic given the ways that it could be abused by some of the more authoritarian governments in the EU. Yes, I'm thinking of Viktor Orbán of Hungary.
A huge ring has been uncovered in the us, with the broad international link, and none of these with mountains of evidence against them is harmed.
Instead they serve in the prominent public positions sometimes silencing and killing their victims.
If the reason in the arguments for the bill is about protecting the children, you can be sure as hell that's a strawman.
> Yes, I'm thinking of Viktor Orbán of Hungary.
Lol what?
The UK leads [edit: in Europe overall, obviously not the EU] with approximately 18 per 100k prosecuted for online speech. Germany is at about 4 per 100k. Poland at about 0.8 per 100k. Hungary about 0.1 per 100K.
For any definition of authoritarian that relates to chat control, the UK is two base-10 orders of magnitude more authoritarian than Hungary (7 base-2 orders of magnitude).
The UK does a lot of prosecuting people for having said nasty things online that someone else didn't like.
Hungary is far more inclined to surveil political opponents, put people in their network in jail without fair trial, surveil successful businesses whose bribes were insufficient, find excuses to punish those businesses.
Lack of fair trials: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20251120IP...
Illegal surveillance of political opposition: https://rm.coe.int/pegasus-and-similar-spyware-and-secret-st...
Strong arming companies into bribes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Fidesz
Not only are there not similar reports about the UK, but its better position in international corruption rankings points to a culture that would be less likely to tolerate this.
Any further questions about why there should be concerns about how Hungary would be likely to abuse a law like this?
Etc.
Specifically for the European Parliament, this is also why, while it is true it doesn't have the power of legislative initiative, given the ability to amend at will any "law", in practice it doesn't make much of a difference.
There's been an influx of low-quality bluesky links being posted lately, HN either needs to be better enforcing existing rules or we need a new one banning editorialized social posts that then link out to primary articles (just post the actual article without the editorialized social post as intermediary!).