I listen to a bunch of (mostly left) podcasts where they sometimes invite members of the European parlement and while I can agree with some of their opinions its downright scary how they think about regulations.

For everything that's wrong in society the answer seems to be more and more regulations. The negative effects (such as the lack of European AI companies) are then waved away (it's because Europe spends their money on American AI instead of investing in EU AI).

It's honestly scary.

The goal is privacy and anonymity. Removing them that is. They don't care about teenagers watching porn, what they want is to know what every person is reading and saying, and being able to punish whoever says things the eurocrats don't like. That's the reason the age limits are not set in the device by the parents, but you must give your id to some entity.

EU didn't state this for one. The paper they wrote quoted someone else stating this.

EU enshrined privacy in its charter of fundamental rights. GDPR was and still is a major protection.

US, from its biggest companies to the whole of Silicon Valley culture has done the exact opposite.

Within the EU, multiple attempts at pushing changes in opposition to this have been proposed, debated, voted on (and rejected), as democracies do.

Not perfect, but when you come down to laws, EU bureaucrats gave EU citizens article 8, US gave them the CLOUD act.

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