They have the option to opt out. It's not written in this particular blog post but it was part of the original proposal. I don't see why they would not have kept it in there.

The logic doesn't even make sense. "Save the children, except of course the politician's children".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40063025

You lesser people. Government officials and agents will need chat systems that are exempt, so they can officiate and agentize. Surely that's plain to see? Don't worry, they've promised not to use it to groom kids or anything.

In all seriousness, what prevents this from just being ignored and people using open source software? Is it that the EU will prohibit open source chat from being sold on the various app stores?

> In all seriousness, what prevents this from just being ignored and people using open source software? Is it that the EU will prohibit open source chat from being sold on the various app stores?

The European Commission proposal said providers of software application stores should be made subject to obligations to take certain reasonable measures.[1] It seems likely removing non compliant apps would be considered reasonable.

Commercial open source apps would be more likely to comply with the requirements than non commercial closed source apps I think.

[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...

People won't use free software. Proprietary software is enforce by (self)regulation. I.e. you can't use banking apps of rooted android. Some banks won't allow Linux Firefox and so on.

Of course not. This will be decided under current Belgian presidency. Belgian politicians already have a very recently upgraded secret non-css communications government network at their disposal (This was in the local press a couple of weeks ago). I guess they see what's coming.