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The European Commission has far too much power, and answers far too little to the populace. In reality, they want to be dictators. If you don't know, the unfor
by bradley13 18d ago
The European Commission has far too much power, and answers far too little to the populace. In reality, they want to be dictators.
If you don't know, the unfortunate way thf EU is structured, the Parliament cannot initiate legislation. They can only vote on whatever the Commission puts in front of them.
If the Parliament votes "wrong", the Commission just repackages the idea in a new bill, pulls a couple of dirty tricks, and tried again. They only have to succeed once. See ChatControl for a prime example.
So the EU will eventually require backdoors in encryption. It's only a question of how many tries it takes...
- christkv 18d agoThis its more like an oligarch edict with democratic dressing. Its set up so the European elite can force political chance without having to deal with annoying things like democracy other than in name
- p_l 18d agoUnfortunately every attempt at reforming it is blocked with "but my sovereignty!" - as EC and Council of Ministers are very much controlled and steered by member nations' governments. Not to mention it makes for perfect scapegoat
- shevy-java 18d agoThat is also true - national countries sabotage any reform. Basically the EU would have to be designed anew from the get go, but lobbyists will prevent this from ever happening.
- LaurensBER 18d agoI have many concerns about the rise of populism in Europe but the (few/very few) good things that might come out of this is that there will finally be (enough?) pressure on the EU to reform. Despite all their talk about being pro human-rights and pro democracy in practice the voter turnout percentages for the EU elections are extremely low. As an EU citizen I almost never meet someone who's interested or who feel represented by the EU. There's, no doubt, several reasons for it but the biggest one might be that an additional abstraction layer that's cultural too far away from the average voter.
- Xelbair 18d agoEU and EC have been made as a resistant to populism by design, the end result is that we citizens can't change anything, and decisions are arbitrarily made behind closed doors. The amount of layers between your vote, and the elected official that matters is just too big to have any form of accountability, especially when you couple it with national issues. I'm frankly less concerned about populism, but more concerned about sheer disregard of opinions of citizens.
- vladms 17d agoNot that they don't disregard some of my opinions too, but I am quite worried about the opinions of some of the other citizens. The worst thing might be that it is kind (or close to) a best possible average (can't assess honestly). When I talk with many (mostly opinionated) people, at various ends of various positions (left, right, ecology, industry, security, etc.) I can't imagine any leadership that would make a significant portion of the EU citizens happy. Now, the historical solution was to make things so worse to calm down all the crazy ideas (mostly implying war or revolution) and make people focus on the basics, let's see how it goes around this time.
- MrBuddyCasino 18d ago> In reality, they want to be dictators. Its much worse than that. They want to be unaccountable bureaucrats.
- bartleeanderson 18d agoVery funny if it weren't so true!
- MrBuddyCasino 18d agoI‘m not being ironic. With a dictator you have full responsibility concentrated in a single person. Bureaucracies are the opposite: they’re intentionally setup to diffuse responsibility as much as possible and hold no one accountable. Instead of a single guy, you now have to fight something resembling a fungus. This is much harder: instead of a decapitation strike, you face an enemy that is more resilient and resistant to change, and near impossible to kill.
- plufz 18d agoAre you saying that historically very bureaucratic countries have been worse to live in than dictatorships? Not sure I follow actually. It sounds very strange to me. Isn’t also the first move of all dictators to take over all institutions with their own people?
- ablob 18d agoThey are saying that in bureaucratic countries there is not a single entity that can be held accountable, which means that "bad" decisions, are not easily undone. Likewise it means that "good" decisions are hard to change. It is a statement about the momentum of change, not about it's worth or intention. There is no further comparison made between these governmental forms and how they affect their subjects. Why would you create such a blatant red herring?
- MrBuddyCasino 17d ago
- AnssiH 18d ago> So the EU will eventually require backdoors in encryption. It's only a question of how many tries it takes... So how many tries (i.e. EU parliamentary votes on an actual legislative text brought in by commission) has there been for encryption backdoors or mandatory screening of chat content? There has actually been only one, the November 2023 vote on CSAR regulation, and it was rejected overwhelmingly (https://edri.org/our-work/eu-parliament-committee-rejects-mass-scanning-of-private-and-encrypted-communications/ https://edri.org/our-work/eu-parliament-committee-rejects-ma...). There is no reason to believe the same thing won't occur in future votes.
- qwytw 18d agoUntil they come up with a procedure to workaround the fact that there is no majority in the EU parliament and push it through anyway (like they did a couple of weeks ago with ChatControl 1.0).
- AnssiH 18d ago"ChatControl 1.0" is entirely voluntary so there is much less opposition in parliament.
- fwn 18d agoChat Control 1.0 is not at all voluntary for those controlled by it. For example: there is no setting in Facebook Messenger where users can enable or disable Chat Control. This is like saying that private prisons are voluntary because the corporations that run them were not forced into the market.
- inigyou 18d agoThere's no setting in Facebook where I can tell Meta to bake me a cake either. But I'm still allowed to buy cakes.
- 1718627440 17d ago
- deleted 18d ago[deleted]
- betteryet 18d agoThe dictators part is false, the EU is not a structure you can easily dictate. But this encryption backdoor thing is somebody's pet project and extremely alarming. The UK has a similar bend they've already put in place with IPA and TCNs. The US is way gone on decrypted stored data and metadata, but not on encryption backdoors yet, though legislators have tried.
- shevy-java 18d agoYou can. The way this works is via something called money. Or more generally, financial incentives, kickbacks, you name it. Using the UK as bad example, which it is, does not excuse the EU being bad too (or rather here, the EU commission).
- deleted 18d ago[deleted]
- trinsic2 17d agoCan you please explain to me why you think this is the case? Can parliament make law or not? Why is the commission the only body that can make law? Its staffed with people that appear to serve special interests. I saw this during the Stop Killing Games Where the EU commission meet with the game industry privately in EU before the decision on the Stop Destroying Video games Initiative. If there is no way to challenge the EU commission's practices that are not democratic, how can you consider the EU commission a body that actually works for I members?
- snarf_br 17d agohttps://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/en/article/20240524STO21650/what-do-the-eu-institutions-do-infographic https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/en/article/20240524STO...
- dmix 17d agoEU is less of a dictatorship and more of a technocracy. Where they rely heavily on experts to define policy rather than a democratic system. As you said: > Where the EU commission meet with the game industry privately in EU before the decision on the Stop Destroying Video games Initiative The experts they choose can just be anyone with a bit of authority whom the bureaucrats can find to support what they already want to do. Plus lots of paid expert consultants to make plans after the policy is enacted who know to tell them what they want to hear. It's similar to the US media when they bring expert talking heads on their shows (academics, ex-military, etc). They come prepackaged with views the network's want.
- inigyou 18d agoThat is the structure of the EU. Wannabe fascists propose all kinds of laws, then a democracy chooses which ones it wants.
- written-beyond 18d agoSecret Hitler(the boardgame) fan?
- trompetenaccoun 17d agoOr democraticallly rejects them, but trough unbelievable trickery they still become law. See Chat Control, which never had majority support in parliament. Democracy with Brussels characteristics.
- inigyou 17d agoChat Control 1 isn't a law, it's the lack of a law. Chat control 2 is a law and it was profoundly rejected.
- surgical_fire 17d agoWho picks the comissioners are the national governments. It's important to lay the blame on who is actually pushing this crap. It's little coincidence that the EU parliament, who actually represents the people, that keep shooting shit like this down.
- dingdingdang 17d agoGiven the almost religious attention the term limit of sitting presidents of the US has it is interesting that so very little attention is given to the fact that the EU structure has no effectual limit at all; if the current EU President were to be nominated by the European Council in a circular manner she will effectually serve for perpetuity (while the Parliament can in principle say no they are only ever given one candidate to vote for (...) and has thus far never said no to any nominee).
- whatsThisBtn4 17d agoThe United States is religious against kings and genuinely thinks they have a holy mission of humans right, freedom, democracy, and liberalism. Obviously this doesn't always happen, but there's only an extremely small minority that think otherwise. Maybe put me in the otherwise camp. Disappointed democracy produced Trump. Maybe we need a technocracy to defend the world from China.
- cooggog 17d ago[dead]
- woodruffw 17d agoI don’t think the average American voter “genuinely” thinks that they’re on a Blues Brothers-style mission from god to deliver liberalism and freedom to the world. I would be surprised if that’s even a minority view among voters.
- whatsThisBtn4 17d agoDid you go to k12? It's indoctrination, math, and reading.
- idoubtit 17d agoThe average American voter does think the USA play a positive role for the world, while the average non-American think otherwise. In details, a 2026 study from the Pew Research Center states that: - 57% of A. think the USA contribute to peace in the world a great or a fair amount. - Republicans and supporter think so at 82%. - Outside of the USA, the median is at 35%.
- stymaar 17d ago> The European Commission has far too much power, and answers far too little to the populace. In reality, they want to be dictators. As much as I hate the political leaning of the Commission, this is complete bullshit. The commission is named by the member states' head, with the head of the commission and the individual commissioners' nomination being validated by the European parliament. Yes they aren't elected, but that's no different from a minister in most country, nobody elected the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the UK, the Secretary of Defense in the US or the Ministre de l'Intérieur in France. But we don't call them wannabe dictators because that would be silly. That's equally silly when talking about the European commission.
- riedel 17d agoI don't think it is too much power or even the wish for more. It is IMHO more the disconnect of EU beaurocrats and the Brussels bubble. We need more direct legitimation given the amount of power they have (actually down to the DGs).
- whatsThisBtn4 17d agoThe wild part is that both the United States and China will get the decryption. There's too much money and corruption in the world. Maybe local(European states) won't care as long as they can use it against their people in their feifdom.
- m4rtink 17d agoI understand this setup was likely necessary to get countries to join initially, but it no longer makes sense & should be abolished, with all power of the commission given to the parliament.
- rjzzleep 17d agoIt's unfortunate that some of us have been warning and shouting this for years, before it got to this place, and before they amassed all this power, and now that it's almost too late people are catching on.
- marcus_holmes 17d agoI'm a little hazy on how this gets enforced. I thought the EU made rules, but then those rules had to be ratified and implemented by the national governments of the member nations (and historically, some of them have been very lax about implementing and enforcing those rules). Will we end up with a hodgepodge of national rules from each EU country that is effectively unenforceable? Or is there a different mechanism that allows the EU to enforce a blanket rule over all the EU nations?
- touristtam 17d ago> The European Commission has far too much power, and answers far too little to the populace. In reality, they want to be dictators. This is an incredibly uninformed take on how the EU is structured and completely undermine the argument you’re trying to make.
- superze 17d agoUrsula is 100% a dictator and the EU as well. All in the pockets of Bibi. Every time I hear it's a democracy I want to gag. We have a huge issue with fascists again and it won't solve itself.
- raxxorraxor 17d agoSome argue the commission still has democratic legitimacy through national governments. In my opinion that is simply not the case for several reasons.
- soueuls 16d agoThe EU has never been a democratic entity, As a French, I still remember the so-called "2005 French European Constitution referendum (Do you approve the bill authorising the ratification of the treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe?) 55% of voters voted no despite the constant propaganda on TV nudging people to vote yes. In 2007, the new French president was elected, he was very pro EU (like the vast majority of French politicians), after several meeting behind closed doors, it was decided to bypass the will of the people though the ratification of a treaty without a referendum. The Lisbon Treaty, was voted by the Parliament. We can argue that this was decided by the French politicians and not EU politicians but we are now two decades into it and the same playbook have been used over and over. The EU constantly dilute responsibilities. Our local politicians will claim they can't do much, this is now decided in the EU and the EU politicians will claim that the national governments decided to adopt this on their own terms. We are now completely deprived of any freedom and I personally made the choice to leave the EU because it gives a bad taste to live in a place where everything is decided behind closed door without any possibility to vote on anything.