First paragraph is about regulating US companies. It doesn’t affect the interests of the EU oligarchs.

It's also not necessarily against their interests either. For example Article 15 made any European google alternative much harder, that's good for Google. Google can afford to comply with any regulation, smaller EU google wannabes can not as easily.

Then regulation like unified digital id is big business, the EU is a neoliberal institution, most of everything their member states governments do is through public-private partnerships, there is profit to be made. So investments in things like age verification are funneled to lobby for them. The EU in general is almost as big in lobby spending as the US.

The other thing is the US intel easily gets a full plaintext feed from things like whatsapp, but the EU needs chat control/etc. to get the same access.

Like all bureaucracies .. the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.

Also our government (I'm a citizen in the kingdom of Denmark) doesn't listen to experts when it comes to IT/security/encryption and is making a fool of itself..

It will pass.

The EU is not one voice. It's comprised of multiple member states, each one with their own views and opinions. One member state proposed privacy friendly laws and it passes, another proposed privacy invasive laws and it doesn't pass.

It's a distributed democracy.

> The EU is ... It's a distributed democracy.

Maybe only distributed. /s

Hah indeed maybe, hopefully the French will pull out the guillotines once more before that happens.

Because the world view of people leading EU isn't the same as American "corporations and the state are the same thing'.

Once you get that, a lot of thing start to make sense.

The EU isn't one single decision-maker. There was a brief period where the EU had both the GDPR and the Data Retention Directive, which were practically contradictory (the courts nuked the Data Retention Directive).

Chat Control isn't really "the EU". It's the national governments. USB-C was the bureaucrats/technocrats ("the EU"), Chat Control is government ministers from each country (the "Council")

The official name is not "Chat Control" but rather "The Regulation to Prevent and Combat Child Sexual Abuse".

Of course, people are free to claim that it won't work, or that it's heavy handed, or that it's secretly nefarious, but there is a plausible answer to "why?" in the title itself.

Plausible? Think of the children is a stock lie that is never used in good faith. The children do not in fact thrive in a repressive dystopia.

That's certainly an interesting take.