Comment by m000
15 hours ago
There should be sorts of an exponential backoff mandated for the contents of bills.
Now, every lobby group keeps pushing their sketchy agenda, knowing well that they will eventually pass it. Worst case, it will be passed bit by bit.
That's also problematic.
Currently the same proposal is being discussed over and over again but if that wouldn't be possible it's easy introduce "similar" ideas.
Ultimately law makers need to be able to pass new laws, even controversial ones, or the power to so slowly shifts to someone else (e.g. the executive in the USA)
Not having a majority is the only way to stop the process and if the population is in favor, doesn't care or can't be bothered any law will pass.
The whole point of governance in a democracy is consent of the governed. When lawmakers start actively going against the interests of society at large, then they've entered into the realm of authoritarianism with an occasional election - which is exactly what we accuse the 'bad guys' of doing.
>When lawmakers start actively going against the interests of society at large[...]
But how does banning subsequent attempts at passing bills prevent this? Moreover what's preventing this mechanism from being abused to block legislation that society actually want?
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I am not sure because this assumes a very well informed and educated population.
Think about this one, start a populist stupid referendum like: "Should the gov give you $10M?", I could bet it will end up at 90% yes and the entire country ends up in ruins. So democracy is good but you need some sort of trust in the middle. With this backward law, the trust is eroding.
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The problem here is that many who are in favour of Chat Control (and of its predecessors) really do honestly think they're doing something for the benefit of society.
Focusing on these supposedly well-meaning individuals - I'm going to assume they somehow never consumed any dystopian fiction as a child, the purpose of which was to inoculate a generation against totalitarianism. They don't understand the overreach they are committing to. They think that, because they're a Good Person and wouldn't abuse it, nobody else will, and the massive security loophole created by this effort will not have any downsides. They'll just be able to stop all the baddies!
Meanwhile, those of us who live in reality know that:
* smart criminals will just use unlicensed technologies to get around this, trivially
* dumb criminals will figure out how to use code words for plausible deniability / bayesian "hide in plain sight"
* political dissidents who are exercising free speech will become more vulnerable than ever
And, of course, that's all if the government was only populated by good people who don't intend to abuse this! I have no reason to believe that; does anyone? Is there anyone who so truly loves their government in 2025 that they want them reading all their messages (even moreso than now)?
Can't wait to go to jail for texting a meme to the group chat.
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That's the benefit and frustration of the democratic or representative democratic process.
Balance access to governance with fairness, and accept that you will never always get your way.
Similar to this, indeed some kind of fair and predictable cooling off period for a piece of legislation ensures the governing body isn't frozen in one influential faction's obsessions, while also allowing the voice of the people that faction represents to still be heard.
But exponential backoff feels too open to be gamed by countervailing factions. Some small period of time within a session however could make sense.
> When lawmakers start actively going against
The bill is being pushed and reintroduced by elected representatives from each country, both in the council as well as EP.
People electing populist elements and then being surprised pikachu at the suboptimal policies.
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I disagree on this one.
In the same way you can't be prosecuted twice for the same crime in the US system under the "double jeopardy" clause, there should be an equivalent system where the same law can't be pushed over and over until it passes.
Double jeopardy in the US means being prosecuted for the exact same crime more than once. It does not, however, prevent being prosecuted for similar or related crimes.
For instance, when local white juries would acquit white defendants in for lynching black people in the South, the federal government could (and did) try them again for the crime of violating the victim's civil rights. Same set of facts, but different crime. Not double jeopardy because they were being prosecuted for a different crime.
That doesn't work for legislation, because defining when a law is "the same" is basically impossible. If I change one word, is it the same? What if I "ship of Theseus" the law? At what point is it a different law?
Many legislatures ban members from repeatedly bring the same bill in the same session, which does require a similar determination. But that's a much weaker prohibition (even if the determination was wrong, you can always bring the law for a vote next year), and it is a necessary limitation to allow the legislature to get other work done without having members clog the process by bringing the same bill for a vote over and over again.
In many countries, it took multiple attempts to get gay marriage legalised. Having a double jeopardy type block for repeated attempts at passing laws would prevent social changes being captured in law.
Also it would be easy to weaponised by proposing something that doesn’t have enough support now so that it can never be passed in the future.
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And there is in most parliamentary law, but usually restricted to sessions. Additionally, there's usually a proscription against passing negative laws (i.e. "we will not do X"), meaning that when something passes it becomes law and needs a supermajority to repeal, but when it fails, all it needs is a majority to be passed (in the next session.)
The problem is that parliamentary law and democratic processes have ossified for the last 175 years, while "positive" bills have been passed to push more power to the executive, but can't be removed without supermajorities (that are now impossible because the executive has more power over elections and the schedule.) The last person to think seriously about parliamentary law was Thomas Jefferson, and he was really just encoding, organizing into a coherent system, and debugging Commons practice.
If you think that the US has pushed too much power into the Executive, you should look at recent history (since the 80s-90s) in Britain. The opposition has no power at all, and even backbenchers in government have no power at all. They've been reduced to hoping that the right marble gets pulled from a bowl that allows them to hopefully read a bill out loud that might get on tv that might get an article written about it that goes viral, that might put pressure on the government to do something about it.
The EU doesn't even have that level of democracy.
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There are a bunch of people in my country who have been pushing against abortion rights for 50 years. So far they have never even come close.
Now I suppose theoretically one day all the other 100 members of parliament accidentally push the wrong button but it seems farfetched.
It would be nice, but they change it a little bit so it's technically a different law.
It is not at all obvious to me that a government, acting from the authority of a public mandate, has to be able to pass controversial laws—which by definition lack that same consent.
I wish there were a “No, And Stop Asking” law where you couldn’t propose a law again within X years after it fails to pass.
I know a million reasons why that’s probably impossible, starting with “what makes it the same law?”, but I can still wish we had one.
It would be possible to proactively pass a law that is incompatible with future attempts, right?
E.g. in this case something like a "right to chat secrecy" law.
We already have this. It's even a law you can't change easily. We call it constitution, what ever that is. It obviously doesn't matter here.
Yes, but whatever law you pass that is incompatible with future attempts can just have its repeal included as part of future attempts.
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Well, this kind of thing really belongs in a constitution, where it would block any attempt to pass creeping mass-surveillance laws like Chat Control.
So if a party which rejects some policy loses the election (possible even directly because of that) their opponents who always supported that law wouldn't be allowed to vote on it again?
Seems extremely easy to abuse...
I did mention that it had a million problems.
Not sure how true that is, but I heard people mention that the law would be unconstitutional in Denmark, where this iteration was born. If so, I think that should be a limitation as well.
Maybe on the condition that the law was struck down by courts. Otherwise it would block iterations on any controversial topics that need time to reach consensus.
Some others here asked how would we decide what is the same law. That’s pretty easy: same as with many other not so clear things, if some sues a judge/jury hears both sides and makes a decision.
I doubt that this can be actually done as intended because the wording of a bill can be changed enough to pretend it's not the same as the previous versions. I can't really think of a way to make this work, but indeed it would be a great addition to law passing.
Good idea. yeah at this point, law making every were just seems like brute force attack at this point. We need some kind of security assure to keep out these 'law making crackers'
It exists but the proposal must be voted on. These people will not put the proposal to vote if they know it will not pass. That's why they ask countries' positions up front.
Wouldn't that potentially be exploited by the opposition where they could push a similar bill but with unpopular additions?
Also an expiry date for every bill. All things should have a timeout.
We should fund another lobby that pull in the other direction.
Trying to prevent stupidity by regulations and rules is proving to be problematic: Because we have very successfully prevented stupid from destroying themselves, and let them thrive on the successes of others built (e.g. anti-vaxers are relatively safe thanks to everyone else vaccinating their children, or you can thrive on benefits in the UK which is great when you genuinely tried your best but fail, but terrible when it is motivating you to stop trying).
This fundemantally conflicts with a lesson startup scene learned very early: Fail fast, fail often. Our societies do not fail fast when they make mistakes, thanks to the incredible safety and stability intelligent and sensible people created.
This is preventing people from learning from their idiocies, which in turn allows them to reach to critical mass and forcing their idiocy on the whole society in the form of bullshit or hurtful laws and orders.
We should change this and let idiots fail fast before they become a danger to everyone.
As other comments on this post have mentioned, exponential backoff would still have some issues.
However, we could envision a rule where controversial bills have to be validated by a strict majority, or even a supermajority (75% minimum) of the voting population via referendum.
I feel like in 2025 it should be doable for a state to ask its citizens to vote online to show that they support a bill, and if a given bill lacks support amongst the citizen body of that state, it's probably not worth passing.
> There should be sorts of an exponential backoff mandated for the contents of bills.
I don't think that's workable:
* If it only works for exact bills, they'll just change a tiny bit and resubmit, and we're back to square one but with frustrating procedures/paperwork.
* If it works for approximate bills, then it will be abused by opponents that introduce fatally-flawed versions of your good bill in order to block you from ever getting it voted-on.
But that's exactly how the EU works. If you give the "wrong" answer they'll keep going until you give the "right" answer.
France and the Netherlands rejected the proposed EU constitution... nevermind, the same was in the later Lisbon treaty.
Ireland rejected the Nice and Lisbon treaties... nevermind they still passed when asked again after cosmetic changes and "information campaigns".
Poland voted for the wrong government... EU suspended funds until they voted for the right government at the next election.
> Poland voted for the wrong government... EU suspended funds until they voted for the right government at the next election.
On the other end there is the "don't interfere with anything" and you get totalitarianism as a side effect, eventually. If a democratically elected government passes a law that makes killing some category of people lawful, should they be allowed to do it?
That escalated quickly from my comment to "but Nazis"...
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> Poland voted for the wrong government... EU suspended funds until they voted for the right government at the next election.
I am polish, please *do not spread falsehood*.
EU funds suspension came because of Polish non-compliance with several EU laws.
Most notably the previous government had created a "new" government-controlled chamber of judgement that gave de facto the executive branch control over the judicial one.
Judges in Poland could be suspended and punished if politicians didn't like their rulings. Not only that, judges could be suspended, fined and even jailed over any public comment.
This created a situation where essentially judges where promoted, punished or cherry picked according to how aligned they were to the ruling party.
This was a blatant violation of Polish constitution as well as the treaties Poland itself signed when joining the EU.
Well an euroskeptic government is out and a new as pro-EU as is possible to be (Donald Tusk was President of the EU Council) is in, so all is well... You may recognise a pattern that is at play in other countries both in the EU and outside.
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It is the courts' job to block unconstitutional or otherwise illegal laws.
I believe someone said in a previous thread that a court in an EU member state had already found this mass surveillance on citizens who are not criminal suspects to be illegal under either their constitution or the Charter of Fundamental Rights, but I can't find it anymore. I am wondering why that is not sufficient to permanently block this.
Edit: This is not to say that you shouldn't resist the laws at every other level, too, because you definitely should.
I believe it was Germany's constitutional court, which given the experience of East Germany is understandable.