this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2026
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Yes; recent news have made me somewhat optimistic that the resistance to it is winning though.
Age verification laws currently look like a much greater danger to freedom.
Personally I think that win (while really a win) is being overcelebrated.
It's easily reverted. All they'll have to do is find some csam or terrorism related scandal in the news and pump it as a big deal, and all the resistance will be gone at the next vote.
With chat control we actually have to distinguish two different things that people sometimes confuse:
Voluntary chat control is about letting operators of communication services voluntarily scan messages for certain illegal activity (without this constituting a violation of data protection laws). This doesn't break encryption and isn't a part of a war on general purpose computing. While there are many good arguments against it, it's not especially catastrophic. It's a detail of business regulation.
Mandatory chat control is about forcing them to do so, which must necessarily break encryption and impose limits on software freedom. This is what is most important to oppose.
The most recent win ended up rejecting even (most) voluntary chat control, which is a good sign that mandatory chat control won't get a majority either.
It has very nearly got a majority several times. I'm sure that with some media manipulation (eg milking an incident) it will be easily pushed through.
Imagine if the Dutroux scandal would happen now. They'd jump on that to push all kinds of monitoring on everyone. Even though this would not be prevented by it in any way (and in fact that all happened long before WhatsApp even existed)
"Several times"? There were two votes to date.
The only "majority" we've been hearing about were the "these governments support this idea" maps, which have minimal bearing on how the EU Parliament actually votes.
Correct me if I'm wrong.