Comment by isodev
1 day ago
> how democratic of the EU
Well, these are the MEPs elected by member states. We don’t like the outcome but this means chat control is well supported within the government of each country.
1 day ago
> how democratic of the EU
Well, these are the MEPs elected by member states. We don’t like the outcome but this means chat control is well supported within the government of each country.
MEPs are directly elected by citizens, not governments. It's the Council instead where representatives (ministers) of all national governments sit
Yup, edited to clarify I mean the MEPs bring “the will of the people”. Clearly not enough has happened on local level to raise awareness / lobby against chat control. I don’t think many outside tech are even aware if the slippery slope of the surveillance machinery.
The European Council (heads of states) sets the agenda, the European Commission (delegates from each state) writes the laws, and the MEPs (elected by the public) decide whether or not to accept the laws.
The Council decided Chat Control was on the agenda, the Commission wrote the law, and the MEPs voted to reject said law in March. Then the president of the parliament (not the MEPs at large) asked the Council to ignore the March vote and proceed with the agenda under urgency as if it had passed.
Now a minority of the MEPs (331 out of 720) - but a majority of who were present at the time and chose not to abstain - have voted to deal with the matter under urgency, but haven't voted on the substance of it. This makes the actual vote happen on the last sitting day, when apparently they are hoping a lot of MEPs will be away.
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The parliament rejected the proposal twice. Yes the governments support it, but not the people of European countries
And who exactly elects the governments I wonder? Aliens?
uhm, the will of the people is often already half-lost with the politicians/parties they directly elect, so I would hardly consider another layer of representative "demo"cracy on top of another layer of representative democracy following the will of the people at all.
But true, I blamed this on the Commission when I should have just started with this criticism of the overall system.
Is it really supported by the people, or just the politicians?
If the former, the EU is an autocratic democracy. If the later, an autocratic oligarchy.
Either way bad. Only true democracy in Europe is Switzerland where the people actually get to vote on laws.
We have representatives in Switzerland, please don’t misrepresent our political system to push your anti-EU agenda. We do not vote on every single laws. It’s a semi-direct democracy. A representative democracy is the most common instantiation of democratic systems.
Representative democracy vs direct democracy is the actual dichotomy you’re looking for.
Making it not illegal for Facebook to scan your DMs is not autocracy. (And we know Facebook does that whether it's legal or not.) To make it autocracy, at a minimum they'd have to mandate the scanning, which is Chat Control 2, which is still not passing.