I think it's inevitable that at some point some legislation like the OSB will pass in most western countries.
It's going to be no different at all from the current situation.
It's going to be no different at all from the current situation.
- All online messenger providers (Whatsapp, Signal, Telegram) e.g. withdraw from the UK market. Meta and Google gave a taste for this after Canadian link law.
- UK needs to come up with a crappy homebrew messenger ecosystem no one uses. Maybe a messenger.gov.uk?
- People download applications with privacy and sideload them to their mobile phones, keep going with their business as usual
- The number of childs protected or caught pedophiles stays unchanged
- UK parliament members who proposed the bill will look like idiots, not getting re-elected
- The "compliance" companies who promoted these solutions, as it's driven by commercial interest that guides the political discussion, go bankcrupt
However I remain doubtful if we have this ideal scenario.
Some things never change.
No one will lose re-election over a technical or scientific issue such as this. 99.9% of the public can't understand the position, the discussion, and will only listen to what fluff websites, and the parties tell them.
Now, is any party going to take up a "soft on pedophiles!" position? Because that's how it will be played...
It's already a nonissue on the most popular device.
Eventually the sale of devices that don't include cryptographic controls to prevent terrorists from misusing them to evade terrorist surveillance will be outlawed.
*If you choose to fact-check this, be aware that technically the European Commission will be designating Alphabet, Google’s parent company, rather than one of the multiple subsidiaries with Google in its name. So the official EU communications about this may not mention the word Google.
This law doesn't just apply to messenger apps. It applies to almost every single act you perform on the internet. Everything will be mandated to be broken, including your browser. If you run a web server using https, you'll be breaking the law. If you ssh to another computer over the internet, you'll be breaking the law. If you connect to a VPN to access a work/university/school network or indeed a commercial VPN, you'll be breaking the law.
That's not true at all. If OSB is passed, things will be quite different in the UK afterward.
For everything else there are foreign agencies who are not limited by uk legislation.
Encryption can hide web browsing and a lot more, which they don't like.