It’s complicated. These things are very uneven between countries, and the Netherlands so far do seem like the ones most enjoying their US dependence. This is the most egregious case, but there have been plenty of others recently where the establishment is strongly resisting digital autonomy (and let’s not even talk about Mark Rutte going from “Teflon” to “daddy’s boy”).

Other countries are doing better. It’s interesting that the most “digital” in the continental EU, is also the one most deeply in bed with big tech (whereas German fax machines are already 100% sovereign)

Open Office? 2008 called, they want their office suite back.

From what I understood this is the old chat control, not the 2.0 kind.

And that one had been with us for what? 5 years? Before it finally expired in March.

And while I am certainly not a fan, the two are not to be confused.

Chat Control 1.0 means Facebook, which normally is forbidden by law from scanning your private messages, is allowed at least to look there for CSAM.

Do you believe that Facebook respects the privacy of your messages? I didn’t think so. This one was even voluntary (for the platform, not the user).

So that one might come back. This time maybe with age verification.

Chat Control 2.0 is the one they’ve been trying to pass for years and failed. That one at some point threatened to backdoor encryption, which would have, even massively worse consequences. Then they tried to plant the idea that they would save encryption, but scan the photos on your phone before sending using an image classification model. Which is better than backdoored encryption, but still a mindbogglingly bad idea, much worse than server side scanning of unencrypted Facebook messages.