>It’s law enforcement companies trying to lobby for increased chat control. They’re doing it via a scummy way of NGO fronts.
This is your hypothesis, and I agree it's a likely one. But frankly nobody knows because it's all being done with dark money. It could also be US national security contractors looking to maliciously exploit EU data networks, or even private data brokers looking for new revenue opportunities. In every case, these possibilities significantly change the tenor of the debate away from "it's just to protect children."
I'm not familiar with the way that EU governance works, but my impression is that dark-money-based lobbying is less common over there. Which is why there seem to be so few defenses against it. Here in the US such lobbying would be less effective, since our structures are more distributed and lobbying would be countered with corresponding lobbying from civil society organizations and the tech industry -- in some sense (and here I only half-jest) we US folks can be more cynical about this because our corruption is more mature.
I'm not convinced it's less common over here, but I do believe it's less blatant. Things operate more in the shadows here, but I'm not at all convinced there is less corruption in/surrounding the EU Commission than there is in the US Senate.
This is your hypothesis, and I agree it's a likely one. But frankly nobody knows because it's all being done with dark money. It could also be US national security contractors looking to maliciously exploit EU data networks, or even private data brokers looking for new revenue opportunities. In every case, these possibilities significantly change the tenor of the debate away from "it's just to protect children."
I'm not familiar with the way that EU governance works, but my impression is that dark-money-based lobbying is less common over there. Which is why there seem to be so few defenses against it. Here in the US such lobbying would be less effective, since our structures are more distributed and lobbying would be countered with corresponding lobbying from civil society organizations and the tech industry -- in some sense (and here I only half-jest) we US folks can be more cynical about this because our corruption is more mature.