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> The last chance for an agreement under Danish leadership is in December; the government in Copenhagen apparently preferred a compromise without chat control to no agreement at all. The current regulation, which allows the large platform providers to voluntarily and actively search for potential depictions of abuse, expires next spring after extension. It is precisely this voluntariness that Denmark's Minister of Justice now wants to codify within the framework of the future CSA regulation, which also contains a multitude of other, less controversial projects. [1]

Doesn't sound like it is over yet - only delayed.

[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Denmark-surprisingly-abandons-p...

5 comments

The "Yes"/"Maybe Later" school of governance.

That is the only way to run a government.

Consider for a moment what a government of "Yes"/"No Forever, without ever revisiting the question" would result in.

We aren't at the end of history.

Nobody’s talking about a blood oath to promise never to revisit the issue. But there’s a different between leaving the door open to future reconsideration, versus pushing consistently against the wishes of the public and only backing off temporarily for tactical reasons.

And for some reason, once these things pass, it’s a one way door. When does the US public get a chance to reconsider the Patriot Act?

The US public reconsiders it every time it sends a new congress in. Congress can repeal it in any session, they don't need to wait for it to expire.

Like, that's just the nature of representative democracy.

Well yeah, it's exploiting a problem in representative democracy. That doesn't work unless people become single issue voters on specifically that matter, and in that case, you can just screw over the public with something else.

The practice deserves every bit of scorn it gets.

It's not a flaw in representative democracy, it's a flaw in America as a whole. Most recently the public looked at the options before them, and chose to send in a slate of absolute lunatics in.

When you can't even figure out that having blatantly and openly vindictive and corrupt people in government is a bad idea, the fact that they aren't annually revisiting some legislature that's an issue for the 5% of the population that is the tech crowd isn't the problem. Like, it's a problem, but but it's not the problem.

This thread is literally about Denmark and the European Union.

The problem is the asymmetry. If the choices were «yes, but we can re-evaluate later» and «no, but we can re-evaluate later» then there wouldn’t be an issue. But especially with laws implemented at the EU level and not national level, it’s extremely difficult to get out of it after it’s been implemented. The choices are in practice, «yes, for the next foreseeable decades» and «no, for the next year».

As this very news item shows, it's not particularly easy to pass laws either; GDPR took over four years from the commission proposal to a final negotiated text.

We're now at over four years[1] since initial consultations were held and there's still not a formal consensus position in the council and the encryption bypass is explicitly excluded in the Parliament's draft, so it's not like we're particularly close to a law being enacted.

Basically the asymmetry you are describing is pretty exaggerated

[1]: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/PIN/?uri=CELEX:52...

The problem is that for government power expansions/individual rights reductions, "Yes" can in fact be taken to mean "Yes forever, without ever revisiting the question". (The mechanism needn't be that there is literally no formal revisiting; it can be sufficient that weakening government power is politically untenable because whoever proposed it will be held accountable for every subsequent bad event that could hypothetically have been prevented with some unknown additional amount of government power.)

Stasis is not great, but surely preferable to an authoritarian ratchet.

It was an allusion to the tech industry's disrespect for users, when they don't give an option to say no, and please stop asking me, because the company really really wants you to say yes, and what they care about is more important than what the user cares about.

I'm not suggesting that they never reconsider things, just those in government really seem to want it to happen, despite it being unpopular with the electorate, and so they try on a regular basis to get it to happen, despite the public outcry each time.

Well yes but even a no forever would be revisited under the right circumstances.

But what we do need is a wider no. Not just "no this highly specific combination of stipulations is not ok, let's try it again next month with one or two little tweaks". That's what we have now. Whack a mole. The problem with that is that once it passes they will not have a vote every month to retract it again, then it will be there basically forever.

What we need is a "No this whole concept is out of bounds and we won't try it again unless something changes significantly".

Yes, and (at least in the US) we're seeing this in other contexts too. Tons and tons of rehashes of laws restricting abortion, voting rights, or just executive actions that are slightly different from ones previously ruled invalid. The question is "yes" or "no" to what, exactly.

Politics should follow the exponential backoff model xD

Every time your law fails to pass you cannot revisit it for a longer period of time.

1year 5years 10years Etc

Means that laws with enough political will get passed, but bad laws can be more easily blocked.

This doesn't fit at all with how governance and politics works in reality. Rapid changes to society or a crisis can suddenly make deeply unpopular ideas very popular.

Great. Now, define how we can determine if two bills are the same 'your law' (Who decides? Lifetime-appointed partisan judges? The old legislature? The new legislature? The executive god-king?).

... And then figure out how to prevent poison-pill sabotage, because the best way to prevent a legislature from ever passing becomes 'deliberately draft a really bad version of it, and have your party veto it'.

Giving a one-time majority in a legislature a way to constrain anything the next 10 years of legislatures try to do is a terrible idea.

It's a reverse of what you're describing, but a similar mechanism like this in Canada is their notwithstanding clause.

If the Supreme Court of Canada rules a law unconstitutional, the government in power can overrule their ruling by using the notwithstanding clause. However, the notwithstanding clause override to keep the law in effect only lasts for five years. Subsequent legislatures have to keep renewing the override or the Supreme Court's ruling of unconstitutionality takes effect again.

> Giving a one-time majority in a legislature a way to constrain anything the next 10 years of legislatures try to do is a terrible idea.

There's no option to do that though. To block something for 10 years you'd have to stiff it at least 3 times, 1 and 5 years apart (which would mean doing it across at least two legislative terms).

I don't think you understand how legislatures around the world work, if you think this wouldn't be gamed to absurdity.

Important bills generally don't go to a vote unless everyone involved knows exactly how many votes they are going to get. Your proposal won't actually stop anything that a majority wants passed from passing - as long as a minority can't get ahead of them by poisoning the bill.

Bills are not single-issue. Any bill - even the best - can be trivially tanked by attaching a bunch of awful garbage to it. You are giving a single person (or whatever the minimum quorum is for putting a bill to vote) the power to kill, for years, progress on any issue - by putting forward their own version that's saddled with crap.

This would immediately be abused to disastrous effect.

You will end up with a complete farce, with the minority trying to outdo itself by coming up with the worst possible bills imaginable, that happen to include slivers of a majority's agenda. It's completely ass-backwards way to approach any decisionmaking process - because you are effectively giving multi-year issue veto power to any member of a legislature that's willing to embarass themselves by proposing garbage (that they don't actually want passed).

Or, worse yet, the majority will take the bait, and pass the bad bill anyway (because if they don't vote for it now, they won't get the chance to revisit the issue for years).

If it was that simple then no legislature anywhere would ever pass any bill already. Evidently there are countermeasures to these things.

>Consider for a moment what a government of "Yes"/"No Forever, without ever revisiting the question" would result in.

That's pretty much what the US constitution is. Once something's in it, it doesn't realistically get out of it.

The bar for adding something to it is the same bar for removing something from it. It's not 50%.

There's a big difference between hammering something down over and over again until protesters and opposition gives up and "situation has changed, lets revisit this".

Which is, tbh, a bad-faith tactic for wearing down the electorate. It’s similar to how Brexit advocates kept the issue alive until they gained enough momentum to push it through. Nearly a decade later, most of the promised benefits haven’t materialized, and the UK has borne significant self-inflicted economic costs.

Growth has slowed to a crawl (just over 1%), trade friction has choked countless small exporters, and the “take back control” slogan now sounds hollow when irregular immigration is still higher than ever, while industries that relied on EU labor, say, healthcare or agriculture, are struggling.

Even though public opinion has shifted toward rejoining the EU, it could take a decade or more to rebuild the political will — and any return deal would likely come with less favorable terms.

Wait, so people who maintain strong beliefs that disagree with you long enough to ‘win’ are acting in bad faith (brexit), but working for 10 years to re-enter the EU wouldn’t be?

That’s a tough bar to get past…

There’s an entropy factor involved though.

It’s easier to destroy things than to restore them.

We, the UK, will never be able to rejoin the EU on the same sweetheart terms as we had previously. That’s gone and can’t be replicated.

In much the same way as those campaigning for Scottish independence continue to campaign forever no matter how many referendums they loose, no one will be able to recreate the UK if they succeed.

You need the thinest majority to win and you can keep campaigning forever.

Which is why there was so much outside interference and breaking of the Brexit campaign rules. No matter the cost it can’t be reversed.

> It’s easier to destroy things than to restore them

No such rule exists. Historically, it's been almost impossible to remove any piece of regulation or bureaucracy once it has taken root. Radical dismantling of institutions is a rare thing. That's the same for public services or, say, chat control. I did not expect Brexit to succeed: in fact it only happened because David Cameron had a whimsical moment of fairness and respected a referendum result, against general expectations since he had nothing to gain.

Looking back up the thread, we're equating nagging to construct something (chat control) with nagging to dismantle something (UK EU membership). And I suppose Scottish independence would have aspects of both construction and destruction. The pernicious things that are hard to change are attractive-sounding policy ideas, whether they build up edifices or tear them down.

The issue was that support for "Brexit" was a bad-faith fabrication by Murdoch-owned media with a dash of foreign-funded interference.

When you put down any specific Brexit implementation and asked people to vote on it, you generally got supermajority opposition.

This is similar to, for example, the nitwits in Kentucky who fiercely opposed Obamacare but were vociferously supportive of Kynect and the ACA--all of which are the same thing.

It does read the way you describe in your question. My interpretation of OPs example is more about the asymmetry in how much more (relatively) feasible it is for one party to re-introduce a vote for something than it is to rally political will en masse in a way that reflects what the electorate ultimately wants.

An example that comes to mind is the string of legislation like SOPA that despite having lost, the general goal continued to appear in new bills that were heavily lobbied for.

You’re right. That aspect of how Brexit was carried through was not acting in bad faith. The anti-European faction has been fighting since we joined to reverse it. Many other aspects of the process were in bad faith but people must be allowed to change their minds, disagree, pursue their faith.

The real problem here is that it should be easier to take powers away from them government than to grant them.

If you have a system where passing a law requires three separate elected bodies to approve it, the problem is that it makes bad laws sticky. If a sustained campaign can eventually get a law passed giving the executive too much power and then the executive can veto any future repeal of it, that's bad.

The way you want it to work is that granting the government new powers requires all government bodies to agree, but then any of them can take those powers away. Then you still have all the programs where there is widespread consensus that we ought to have them, but you can't get bad ones locked in place because the proponents were in control of the whole government for ten seconds one time.

Constitutional clause that mandates sunsetting of laws could work for that.

Also, any sort of "vetoing direct democracy", where voters can repeal a law.

The first one mostly works but it generally has two problems. First, they just put "re-pass all the old junk that was about to expire" into this year's omnibus and then there's so much of it at once that the bad stuff gets re-enacted by default. That's better than the status quo but only a little. And second, you don't really want constraints on the government to expire. To some extent you can put those in the constitution, but a lot of this is things like anti-corruption laws that, if the current government is corrupt, they're not going to want to re-enact.

The second one is great. Direct democracy but you can only use it to repeal things. Let the general population veto the omnibus and make them go back and split it out.

As a EU citizen I'd ask for at least a 2/3 majority to let the UK back into the EU, maybe 3/4. They came, they were always skeptical, they left, they want to come back? Please demonstrate that you made up your mind and won't start thinking about another Brexit in less than 10 years.

Brexit can't just be undone. The UK would have to go through the full accession procedure. This would be much easier for the UK than for countries like Georgia, since the UK system hasn't diverged much, but the special agreements and exceptions the UK had would have be renegotiated from scratch.

Adding a new member state always requires unanimous consent from existing member states, for good and ill.

I was an EU citizen. Then I wasn't. Being an EU citizen means nothing.

> Growth has slowed to a crawl (just over 1%)

So like France and Germany?

> “take back control” slogan now sounds hollow when irregular immigration is still higher than ever.

1. Take back control was about a lot more than immigration - it was primarily about regulation. 2. It has stopped EU immigration which was far larger scale than illegal immigration and there was no way of refusing to allow people in or removing them.

> most of the promised benefits haven’t materialized

Nor have the costs. The government predicted an immediate severe recession if we so much as voted for Brexit, let alone implemented it.

That's why sites like this are so powerful. They can bring it back, and we can restart the email bombardment at any time.

This is such a hugely superior approach to the traditional single signer petition or mailing campaign. I think to should be studied by citizens groups worldwide.

> They can bring it back, and we can restart the email bombardment at any time

I'm one of the founders of Stop Killing Games. Me and a large group of other people have gotten annoyed at this cycle and have taken it upon ourselves to make such laws impossible to implement in the future. We're organizing the campaign now - this is fully separate from SKG, but a bunch of the same people who helped SKG succeed, and a plan that takes into accounts the learnings from SKG.

We're looking for people such as politicians, lawyers (EU/US/UK law), journalists, and donors who want to see Chat Control dead forever. If interested, email stopkillinggames+hn @ google's email service.

I think the value proposition for VCs and C-suite is pretty obvious here, you get to keep the government's hands off your communications and internal systems, which is directly where Chat Control is headed. Even avoiding the cost of Chat Control compliance (dev work, devops, legal, ...) can easily run into 7 figures for a larger corporation, and 8-9 figures for the top players.

I know in the US, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden is highly involved in Net Neutrality and tech. I once had a long conversation with his aid who specialized in tech issues and was quite happy with what they were trying to do. I'd recommend reaching out to his team. I'd expect that they would be happy to work with you all and help you navigate the space.

> This is such a hugely superior approach to the traditional single signer petition or mailing campaign. I think to should be studied by citizens groups worldwide.

Why would mass-emailing be effective, though? This one instance strikes me as the exception, not the rule, especially in a world where I see calls to write to your local government all the time (and basically none of it results in anything)

It costs them nothing to ignore emails. There's nothing on your end of the argument to use as leverage. It doesn't put any barriers to just right click->deleting the emails, or answering with something akin to "Thanks for your concern, but this isn't about you and we know better than you, so please stay out of it", just worded in a vaguer and more polite way.

Mass emailing is effective because it's en masse. Hence the success in this situation. The things you're citing are the opposite of this approach.

Both things I'm citing can work on a large scale with some effort, through the power of mass-deletion and auto-replying. I'm just not seeing how pushing some text towards a government representative compels them to act at all, especially when money and power are what's on the other end of the scale.

Well, maybe take a look at how this worked out? Because you're saying that all they have to do is delete the emails, but clearly that isn't what happened here.

The biggest difference is that there's little effort involved here. One click to send mass emails out to all relevant politicians. No they can not ignore a constant stream of emails from the electorate. Frankly, it doesn't seem like you understand why this site was different or effective.

> Doesn't sound like it is over yet - only delayed.

Politicians never step back. They only pause.

Definitely feels like something to keep watching closely

As always...