Same for any legislation piece.

A law that costs 100M people $1 and benefits 100 people with $1M.

Would be, as you noted, costly to oppose, not worth the $1 nor the time.

And at the same time, very profitable for the 100 to spend hundreds of thousands and great effort lobbying for.

It's just the power structure of any representative legislature.

"In vain do we fly to the many"...

One of the failings of most modern democracies is that if a measure doesn't pass, nothing prohibits it from being introduced again immediately. I've seen ballot initiatives simply get copy pasted onto each election by city council until they happen to pass.

There is a German Verein called digitalcourage who lobbies for this: https://digitalcourage.de/en

You can toss some money to the European Digital Rights initiative (EDRi) as well: https://edri.org/

All of those are doing good work in the digital rights space

(Edit: there is probably more but those are the ones that came to mind)

The only way to stop it is to have positive rights written in law, like right to online privacy and privacy of communications.

Ultimately if you want politicians not to do this then you need to start pooling your resources and just paying them not to, because it's pretty obvious with how all this stuff is getting rolled out in a month that someone someone has bankrolled it.

The UK has a petition website. It logs the signatory by constituency. Once a threshold os signatory has cross, the government has to respond and parliament will have to consider a debate on the topic.

The proposing side can be centralised and organised; the opposition diffuse and disorganised. Hence the continual growth of all forms of legislation.

Why would the politician in question give a shit what you think? They get into office mostly by funding which comes from… guess who?

> This is "lobbying" by the people in a disorganised way, trying to fight organised lobbying.

That's gighting against an organized crime syndicate. It requires coordination, resources and aim.

1984 is coming in its worst scenarious.

There will be no win for the people, no hope. Freedom is gone.

On the other hand, elected politicians (senators, MPs, etc) are supposed to represent what the populus wants, else be ejected.

So in theory, they should be paying as much heed to lobbyists as to their constituents.

The question arises, then, as to why they do not. There's no ground swell of public opinion in favour of being continually monitored.

I donate to an org that supports free speech. They do a good job for me. If there’s something they need a signature on I’ll generally follow their instructions and sign it.

I don’t think people are particularly against this. The kids are imploding and people dont care about a completely open internet as much.

I was told by a Brussels lobbyist a long time ago that the EU was by design made for them. I then was shocked how in your face it is within the EU walls.

In a sense citizens also have legitimate lobby groups, they are the political parties we know.

Foreign countries also lobby. Now recently what should worry Europeans is they don't bother anymore and just wipe the floor with the EU representative in front of everybody like Xi and Trump did last week.

So you can vote and lobby but I don't think it is enough today. We should first opt out of a lot of things and defend ourselves digitally:

- Buy some cheap LoRa devices and give some to your friends. Get into meshtastic and reticulum

- Buy some cheap HaLow WiFi devices and get into things like OpenWrt and B.A.T.M.A.N

- Self host as much as you can (It is worth doing just to avoid the Cloudflare " verify you are human" thing)

- Look back into things like Ethereum and good projects, they slowly made some real progress. Crypto is not only about price, annoying bitcoin bros and memecoins. It is still bad but banks and credit card companies are worst.

- Get some useful skills.

We have entered some kind of world war already and it will most likely include some ugly cyberattacks. In that context ChatControl matters much less and you can kill two birds with one stone.

I am still looking for a realistic solution to the email problem. If you have a suggestion I am really listening.

There is no way to resolve these problems. Every answer involves capitulation to governments with loss of personal freedoms.

One has to admit the system is fundamentally broken. Once this is accepted, and people stop investing themselves further in the political system, then we will see change.

Sadly, the change is already planned for and will likely be a jump to some sort of communistic, ai-managed technocracy. However, it is also an opportunity to make the point that force should be no part of a future system. People should be able to opt-in or opt-out. That's freedom.

It's equally difficult to support it, no?

This, I believe, is the only issue with our form of gov. Lack of referendums. In the US, much of the current unpopular issues (Abortion ban, support for Israel's genocide using American taxpayer's taxes, lack of regulations on data harvesting) could be circumvented. I believe the optimal way to avoid these is 1) an educated populace and 2) referendums. The people who were given objective facts, free of propaganda and private interests, decide accordingly. If the majority believes in something, then we the people decide. Congress and the senate have been too bought up by private interests, that starts with campaigning (you receive x millions, from a lobby group (AIPAC for instance), and every legislation that affects their interests has to go through them). I dated a girl who was a lobbyist in DC, and relocated back home. It is unbelievable what goes on behind the scenes. Much of us do not recognize for instance the extent to which fossil fuels or car dealerships dictate how we live our lives. We may be aware of it, but there is a bureaucratic apparatus built in DC, at least 50x the size of congress, that strips We the people of power.