EU Chat Control Returns with Irish Push to Scan Messages

Chat Control is back, now with Ireland at the helm of the EU

Chat Control wasn't dead; it was waiting its turn. The proposal returns with a technical name that sounds harmless — searches that providers themselves initiate on non-public content — and with the Irish presidency of the EU pushing, according to Mikko Ohtamaa's message that has reignited the issue. Translated into plain language: the app opens the envelope before you do.

Word for word, sugar coating. Sugar to swallow the pill without chewing. It's not a new rule: it's the same one that has already racked up defeats.

How many times has Chat Control been voted on?

The circulating count speaks of around seven lost votes. Seven. And they will come back for more, because the method is not to negotiate but to insist until someone presses the wrong button in a poorly attended, sleepy session. Once approved, the veterans add, there's no going back: regulations aren't cancelled, they're repealed, and that requires another majority that today doesn't seem to be in anyone's mood.

Against that backdrop, the discussion has shifted. The axis is no longer Chat Control yes or no. The axis is who holds the reins.

The problem isn't just the State: it's the companies

Here the argument becomes uncomfortable. The question, it's noted in the thread, isn't just what the State can know, but what the private companies that manage these devices can already know. The episode of hundreds of freezers that stopped working after a software update is recalled, along with the suspicion — never fully clarified — that a printer knows which documents you print and with which ink, lest you use a much cheaper generic one. Control ceases to be a state fantasy and becomes the routine of the device in your pocket.

The question, then, isn't whether the State should read you. It's why a private company can.

Does throwing your phone in the trash help?

This is the other front, and it divides opinion. Against the temptation to disconnect completely comes the argument that abandoning technology is handing victory to those who do use it: whoever controls the tool wins, not whoever throws it in the river. On the other side, the classic response: technology never liberated anyone, and dissent that relied on the power system ended up absorbed by it. Some invoke Ted to settle the matter, while others respond with something more prosaic: if you criticize the operating system that spies on you, look at your ID, which already cross-references data with everything else.

Technology alone doesn't make you free. On that, at least, both shores seem to agree.

What can be done and what can't

The conversation drifts toward something more tangible. They don't need to read your messages: just asking you to identify yourself is enough to make you disappear from the equation. It's the line that separates active resistance from silent surrender. And some are already looking to China for comparison, or to the years before 2008 — when a mobile phone wasn't an extension of the body — to remember that there was life before and there could be life after.

With these ingredients, the forecast is bleak and should be taken with a grain of salt. If the rule passes out of sheer exhaustion, there will be no short-term repeal, though neither will there be a clean implementation: the gap between regulation and reality is always paid for by the same people.