Haven’t found anything that breaks their funding down by source and the majority on the UK govt site is from “charitable activities” (https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/en/ch...)

The top 25 members (£90k+; big tech are here) contributed between £2.25M and £4.37M. The other 110 members contributed between £2.26M and £4.46M.

I get that if you are an ngo that really wants to solve online child abuse you’d want a law like this. It may be mostly the ngo pushing for it, not necessarily big tech. I could be wrong.

If big tech _wanted_ to they could already backdoor their encryption and scan the message content, they don't need regulation to do that. The only thing that changes with regulation is that they now _have_ to, which cannot possibly be in their favor.

Regulatory capture. If the handling of user messages requires constant scanning and there are enough rules that you need a team of lawyers, then only Google, Meta and Apple will be able to afford it.

It's briliant really... instead of trying to dismantle privacy regulations you push for new regulation that overrides them and make data mining users even mandatory.

If the laws are designed to directly benefit it makes sense like with the FAA allowing Boeing to self regulate to the point of killing a few hundred people. This feels more like bureaucratic capture or some other name, where the entity must be so large to interact.

It has the same effect and you are not wrong, I just wish it was clearer.

In any case the OP claimed "Apple is wholly against Chat Control." i don't think it's so wholly if Apple financially supports biggest pro Chat Control proponents. Even if Apple is aware of it or not.

Why an earth would a big tech company say no to gather more info on its users? Show me the first one

The Internet Watch Foundation is one of these NGOs that makes lists of hashed child porn images and URLs. All the big tech companies subscribe so they can coordinate on blocking child porn, as they are legally required to do.

Unfortunately the IWF is also a "charity" and thus engages in political lobbying. Because like all such NGOs they have a single purpose, they lobby for making that purpose easier irregardless of other costs, which they view as out of scope. It's obviously easier to watch the internet if tech firms are forced to watch everything all the time, so that's what they're in favour of.

People actually working at tech firms on messaging systems don't want to do this, however. So they end up funding people who are undermining their own policies. This is very common whenever NGOs get involved e.g. governments funding NGOs that directly undermine the government's own efforts.

The fix would be for tech firms to leave the IWF and set up their own alternative organization that doesn't engage in lobbying activity. However, that would require a lot of cross-org agility that is difficult for big companies to achieve even internally, let alone across the industry, and the leadership is all thinking about AI anyway not EU stuff where they already just assume the EU is going to regulate them all the death anyway. So inertia carries the day.

[1]: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/26073615-c-2025-5430...