EU doubles down on penalising privacy-friendly and encrypted messaging services
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sun_is_ra@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
Copying the top comment in HN discussion
avianlyric 1 hour ago | next [–]
The title of this article is very misleading, suggesting that EU governance is some kind unified body, and that these documents actually represent what “The EU” wants to do.
EU governance is far more complicated, and these documents only represent the view of one part of the EU governance system, the EU Council.
The EU council is basically made up of people sent by the state governments of all the members, and basically represents the views of those state governments. The council is the only legislative writing body in the EU, but it has no power to enact legislation. It can only write proposed legislation, and present it to the EU parliament for voting on.
The EU parliament is made up of directly elected MEPs and represents the interests of EU citizens as a whole, and not as individual member states. To get legislation passed, the parliament and council need to work together to get legislation written that the council is happy to write, and the parliament is happy to enact. The council is small body of 27 people, representing the interests of state governments, and the parliament 705 MEPs and represents “the people”.
There’s currently no evidence that these proposals by the Council will have any success in the parliament, if anything quite the opposite. The EU parliament has made I quite clear they don’t like this type of draconian legislation, and won’t vote to enact it.
Obviously that doesn’t mean we should ignore these proposals. It’s important to make it clear we don’t like it, and lend weight behind the arguments being put forward by MEPs to block this legislation. But to say this represents the EU “doubling down” on penalising privacy-friendly services is ridiculous. It represents the EU council doubling down, but that only one small part of the EU governance bodies, and the other bodies are actively fighting back.