EU parliament accepted a last minute amendment, mandating age verification for pornographic (whatever that is) content online, punishable with up to one year prison sentence.
This was rolled into a directive concerning CSAM. Because adults accessing porn need to be de-anonymised to avoid child exploitation?
I just can‘t wrap my head around, how on one hand the EU is protecting its citizen with strong consumer protection laws, strong data security laws and overall mostly good and logical decitions and on the other hand there is this…
In the book The Every Dave Eggers they clearly describe this conception…
I think the overarching theme is that the EU wants more and more power and control.
In the case you describe: it’s by taking away freedom from the US tech giants. In the case of this law, it’s by taking away freedom from their citizens.
Less agency and freedom for others, more control for and subjugation to them, fits as motivation for both.
Ofc. People who push this are in composition 10% moral crusaders and 90% those afraid for their own power and status quo in the coming years. With these pushes toward age verification and message scanning; It’s not just they want to scan everything and watch everybody, they want to test the waters and people to to think they are always being watched and self censor and not do anything against powers that be. They know better than anybody how shaky things have gotten in Europe and how unpopular they really are. It’s pure attempt at population control.
The only problem is that with current people in power they really can’t help themselves, but to make things worse for the average people. So the fire will rise anyway.