by spwa4 | 2025-11-27 10:16:54+00:00
Ah yes, going into details and then leaving out the crucial part. You're technically right about "regulations", which is a technical legal term with a surprise indirect meaning. The surprise is that "directives" also exist.

Of course the situation is that the EU parliament HAS come up with a version of the Chat Control law. It can be summarized very succinctly:

"NO" (obviously I mean that nothing passed parliament, I do get that they did work on a couple dozen versions of the actual law too. However the final outcome really is "NO")

Now, can you tell me how the role of parliament "changes" if they actually follow through on their threat *, which is of course to turn this from a regulation into a directive?

* the threat is that this is the EU council, not the EU Commission, which could do the same (and has in fact done the same for this law, but as pointed out they failed with parliament refusing to pass any kind of compromise at all). The only party that has the power to stop the Commission acting unilaterally to make this law is the EU council, so by getting the EU council to "propose" to parliament, the Commission is signaling that the EU council will choose their side against parliament, and there will be no way to stop them forcing this into law. After this the commission can then claim more legitimacy (because of what happened in the many local parliaments' "fuck the EU and your legitimacy" disasters of the past 2 decades, like the very dramatic fuck-you's to the division rules for illegal immigrants, you can see why they want maximum legitimacy on controversial laws).

Or to put it very very bluntly, this is the commission calling in daddy, because parliament doesn't want to cooperate and daddy EU Council saying "ok, we'll go to parliament together, PARLIAMENT! BEHAVE! You're going to listen and you're going to cooperate!".

And the problem is that in a democracy one might point out that if parliament doesn't want to cooperate, that's the end of the line. That is in fact a pretty good definition of the idea of democracy.

P.S. I must say, the EU Commission has never cared (at least not successfully) about social policy in the EU. Frankly, the Commission is normally opposed to social progress when it interferes with business. So I find it very hard to understand why the EU Commission is risking yet another legitimacy disaster over ... protecting kids? I've worked for them for a long time and despite the past, they really care about their legitimacy, they don't care about kids (or rather they see themselves as "the voice of reason" in a hopelessly divided Europe, and it's country parliaments that care about social issues, and sometimes even smaller parliaments (like ironically the Brussels parliament currently forcing a government shutdown over social spending). Now, the EU as a whole and the Commission specifically may be right about them often being the voice of reason but it's been made crystal-clear time and time again: the EU population does not want any voice overriding their countries' parliaments, reasonable or otherwise. This was made clear from the very beginning with the Charles De Gaulle - Robert Shuman incident "Un Boche, un bon Boche, mais un Boche tout de même", calling into question the wisdom of letting "Un bon Boche" (he means: a reluctant Nazi collaborator) unify Europe with the creation of the EU.