Denmark reportedly withdraws Chat Control proposal following controversy

> 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...

As always...

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.

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

Politicians never step back. They only pause.

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

> 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.

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?

> 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.

>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.

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".

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.

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.

Or the UK, or Saudi Arabia, or…

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…

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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).

The job of the US Supreme Court is to interpret the constitution, not pass laws. "Interpreting" the Constitution and concluding that it contains a right to abortion, when the constitution says nothing whatsoever about abortion, was an absurdly "creative" interpretation. The left was undermining the constitution long before Donald Trump started to do so.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What's happening to women in the UK? I genuinely haven't heard of anything going on there, so I'm just asking for clarification.

The US Supreme Court has engaged in "creative interpretations" for a very, very long time, considering that amending the US constitution seems to be utterly impossible. There's been no meaningful changes in over half a century. So, the flawed system in the country has led to probably over a hundred years of picking apart largely arcane documents that are utterly disconnected from modern life in attempts to map brand new concepts and ideas to those old documents, no matter what. Hell, the current leading school of thought of conservative-aligned law is that interpreting the constitution should be done by imagining what people surely must've thought all those centuries ago. Oddly enough, doing so allows you to make those imaginary historical figures think in whatever way you like!

So, "the left" hasn't done it first, it's a practice that's much older than Roe v. Wade. Just see all the fun games that have long been played with using the Commerce Clause. And besides, your equation isn't fair in the slightest, where one of your sides undeniably grants people rights (even if on shaky grounds), while the other consolidates power and takes those rights away. But oddly enough, only the transgressions of the left have been mercifully corrected by the court, while some other new developments are to be left undisturbed for the foreseeable future. I wonder why?

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.

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.

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

>amending the US constitution seems to be utterly impossible.

Amending the US constitution is not supposed to be easy. You are supposed to accomplish most tasks through legislation. I see no reason why the legality of abortion should not be accomplished through legislation. In any case, the constitution has been amended 17 times, most recently in 1992. I don't see any slam-dunk amendments which are in need of ratification. If amendments aren't being ratified, maybe it's because we don't have broad consensus on changes which should be made. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

With regard to the rest of your comment, you appear to be responding to something I didn't write. I didn't claim all transgressions were equivalent in magnitude, nor that "new developments" should be "left undisturbed". I think Trump is generally a terrible president. However, I see ways in which the left laid the foundations for Trump's transgressions by undermining the social contract in the US in a lot of different ways, and I want to persuade people that maintaining the social contract is inherently valuable in and of itself, the same way maintaining cooperation in an iterated prisoner's dilemma is valuable.

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

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

I think you are unnecessarily dismissive about the past and its lessons. Human nature and nature of power hasn't changed that much since the 18th century.

In Continental Europe, the tradition is even longer and students of law start by studying Ancient Roman law, precisely in order to understand on which principles modern laws are built.

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.

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.

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».

Stalking, harassment, rape.

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".

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).

> 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.

Definitely feels like something to keep watching closely

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...

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.

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.

It should definitely be difficult, the bar for changing a constitution is high in almost any functioning democracy. However, would you agree that it shouldn't be impossible either? Given that over a third of the currently standing amendments have all been passed in the same year the document was written, it seems undeniable that the rate has slowed dramatically, and the expansion of the country combined with the culture surrounding the constitution has effectively locked it. I wasn't talking directly about abortion, it just frustrates me to no end that the #1 method for passing major legislation (especially anything concerning rights of any kind) today isn't rational examination of the situation and lawmaking to support the best outcome, but having a partisan court wrangle an old constitution into the shape most appealing to them. No justifications are needed, since the way the American public is taught, the US founders are almost demigods who foresaw every permutation of history centuries into the future, so any explanation that leans on their writing, no matter how contrived, is correct.

(Though, the difficulty of even passing laws is something I also noted, but omitted from the original comment. Why haven't they just passed abortion rights into law for those 50 or so years? Why is the judicial branch the main arm of enacting changes for the current changes, with the legislature largely choosing to do increasingly fewer things as time goes on?)

Sorry about my snarky last paragraph - the last sentence of your original comment read as partisan for me, because the unspoken implication in it, at least to my ear, was that Trump's administration was the first on the right to meaningfully engage in judicial games (after the left had been doing it for a long time), and therefore that they're getting their fair comeuppance and making the score even.

I'm confused. The context here is talking about new legal developments. Has the UK passed something that justifies or makes getting away with the things you mentioned easier?

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.

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.

I was just replying to your comment as-is.

This thread is literally about Denmark and the European Union.

> 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.

>would you agree that it shouldn't be impossible either?

I agree it shouldn't be impossible.

>Given that over a third of the currently standing amendments have all been passed in the same year the document was written

I don't think that's a fair comparison since those initial "amendments" are more like changes to the first draft, and didn't go through the usual amendment process.

>I wasn't talking directly about abortion, it just frustrates me to no end that the #1 method for passing major legislation (especially anything concerning rights of any kind) today isn't rational examination of the situation and lawmaking to support the best outcome, but having a partisan court wrangle an old constitution into the shape most appealing to them.

Agreed. Although, in some ways the Supreme Court is actually our least dysfunctional branch of government right now. So, could be worse?

>the US founders are almost demigods

They aren't demigods. But they were wildly successful in both creating a lasting, successful democracy, and popularizing the idea of democracy worldwide. It's hard to argue with results. (Keep in mind that right before the US Constitution was written, the union was on the verge of falling apart, and the main objective was simply to stabilize it.) My [non-expert!] view is something like: The founders' thinking about democracy was more lucid than, say, 90% of conversations about democracy today, but less lucid than, say, the top 1% of conversations about democracy today. I expect if we attempted to rewrite the constitution from scratch, we would get a worse result, since the rewrite would be dominated by the 90% of conversations that are less lucid. (For example, many people think the President should be chosen based on the popular vote instead of the electoral college, and neglect several important advantages the electoral college has which make it a superior method in my view.)

As a concrete illustration of the "90% of conversations are less lucid" point: Voting systems theorists generally agree that ranked choice voting is inferior to plurality voting, but state ballot initiatives to replace plurality with ranked choice tend to fail. I expect if we rewrote the constitution, decisions would get made in this sort of manner. Perhaps one could handpick a team of experts to write a constitution that's actually better, but that would lack democratic legitimacy ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Ultimately, the path to improving the constitution lies in small-scale trial runs of better methods, and educating the public about e.g. the advantages of ranked choice over plurality.

>Why haven't they just passed abortion rights into law for those 50 or so years?

They have done so, in many states. (I'm very pro-federalism.)

>Sorry about my snarky last paragraph

Apology accepted, respect!

It is, but the sub thread is for whinging about the Patriot act and why a representative democracy never gets the chance to repeal it. (Wherein I argue that it has plenty of chances, it just isn't an important political issue compared to, well, everything.)

I said "nothing's ever over" when it comes to human rights, I did not say please offer me a dimwit's assessment of the role of the Supreme Court.

> in some ways the Supreme Court is actually our least dysfunctional branch of government right now. So, could be worse?

In a cynical way, I think that them being dysfunctional could actually be better at this point. On one hand, new pressing issues might not be seen, but on the other, no more new damage can be done.

> But they were wildly successful in both creating a lasting, successful democracy, and popularizing the idea of democracy worldwide. It's hard to argue with results.

I agree, the results are undeniable in some ways. My intention wasn't necessarily to berate the US founders, but point out the culture that has emerged surrounding them. It's not that they didn't have some good ideas, it's that people often tend to see them as universally infallible. If one can tie their proposal to something the founders thought (no matter how tenuous the connection is), the idea immediately gains merit just based on that alone.

While a nation like the US going on for so long without major reforms in its democracy is a commendable thing, the often-unquestioning reverence for anything from the period of its inception has prevented and will prevent people from patching any cracks that show up in the system with age. A government shouldn't ideally rock the boat too much, but it can't stagnate either, history has plenty of examples of both.

> I expect if we attempted to rewrite the constitution from scratch, we would get a worse result, since the rewrite would be dominated by the 90% of conversations that are less lucid.

I think the modern understanding of most of these systems is unquestionably better, the issue that would prevent a better system from being formed isn't just the variety of conversations, but conflicting interests with overwhelming power. The US as it is today was founded by a fairly cohesive and tightly-knit bunch of people (at least, as far as I can understand), in an extremely different world. If the US was given a shot at complete reform today, you would have every major corporation and foreign government jumping in at the opportunity to pull any levers they could reach to ensure an outcome that's favorable to them. It would be a disaster. Hell, even with your example about people voting against ranked choice systems, it's not like all voters are actually informed (or even know anything) about either system. And every time these proposals crop up internationally, there's always lots of marketing in either direction from entities who would really like one outcome. Hence, the people tend to stay conservative and vote against changes.

If we got a panel of experts (or even just any sane people with a cohesive and compatible set of ideas) together, I think that today we have enough information to create systems that are vastly superior to either. The EC was created to address certain problems, but to me it seems to have interrupt the natural power of a vote too much and make the election system too prone to swings led by immensely tiny margins. But yeah, it wouldn't be strictly democratic in the sense that anyone could offer input - but neither was really the inception of the US, most people just chose what they perceived as the roughly better option as a package.