Europe’s Decentralized Messaging Survives “Chat Control” Threat

Good news for anyone building messaging infrastructure in Europe: Denmark's Council presidency is abandoning mandatory detection orders in the Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) proposal for now. The proposal was nicknamed "Chat Control" because it was invasive, requiring platforms to scan all message content. To do that, it would have required bypassing end-to-end encryption, practically creating a surveillance infrastructure.

They gave up after Germany and other EU countries blocked the message scanning obligation. They abandoned plans to put the text to a vote in the Council of the European Union in October as they had hoped. Now, they propose to return to the previous status quo.

It's a relief for companies working on open and standards-based infrastructure. As I've already explained, mandatory scanning is technically impossible to enforce for federated protocols like XMPP and Matrix. Europe's decentralized messaging ecosystem would have been threatened, and the law would have been ineffective at preventing illegal data exchange, as encryption can always be applied outside of the chat application.

I know this is the type of fight that is never really over, but still, it is nice to see that sometimes sanity can prevail.