They don't want to track people who will use those decentralized services. Simple as that.

They want control over majority. Nothing else. Any legal business will be required to do what law requires them and it will affect every citizen.

I have no hope given the stupidity of my country to do something against acts like [1] personal data protection law or the decryption act. US going towards that road only means it's easier to justify our country and many others to go even higher. Soon a mandatory camera inside house for legal citizen.

1] https://carnegieindia.org/2020/03/09/what-is-in-india-s-swee...

Nailed this. This is about controlling the 99% of folks who aren't going to take the extra step of using a decentralized service. Think about how hard it is to get friends and family members on board with something super easy to use like Signal. Open source decentralized services are DOA for the overwhelming majority of people.

Absolutely. Anybody who wants to skirt this can simply use an instance of any number of open source end-to-end encrypted apps and servers. This is not for catching sophisticated criminals.

Maybe the way this plays out is it becomes very difficult for companies to innovate in communications, so open source peer-to-peer tech will end up dominating.

Of course then they'll probably legally attack the open source model.

Banks will love that.

As would EU, South American and Asian businesses, they would VPN to another continent VPN to finally have nested encryption for key stakeholders communication.

I think it will have the Gab effect. Gab advertises as a free-speech service. However, those that are already in the mainstream are generally on Twitter. Thus, the people that are on Gab are the people who got kicked off of Twitter, and and thus Gab is in general a cesspool.

The decentralized services won't be able to provide as smooth a service as the centralized ones, if for no other reason than network effects. Most people don't really care about end to end encryption. What percentage of WhatsApp users or Apple Messages users will quit the service if Facebook or Apple dropped end to end encryption. It will be pretty close to 0%. Thus what you will have is that the majority of people on the decentralized services are there because they are doing shady stuff. Thus the decentralized services will become hives of scams, dick pics, terrorists, child porn, alt right, etc. After a while, even being on one of those services will be seen as suspicious.

That is why somehow decentralized applications have to be better than centralized ones.

Probably need to move toward maximizing decentralization regardless.

Agreed. These are bad bills - but - perhaps they further the eventual necessity of a decentralized Internet?