🇪🇺 A few weeks after the controversial EU Parliament (EP) vote to extend the temporary voluntary message scanning regime ("Chat Control 1.0"), here are my (purely personal!) two cents on what really bothered me about this vote: The Council resubmitting the Commission's proposal is technically legal under EU ordinary legislative procedure - second readings exist for exactly this. What I do find striking though is how almost identical the resubmitted text was to the one Parliament couldn't agree on a few months earlier, and that it came back just three months later. Surprising, but not my main point of criticism. What concerned me more is the procedural combination that made this final vote outcome possible: 1️⃣ On Tuesday July 7, the EPP triggered an urgency procedure requiring only a simple (relative) majority to pass. And it did, 331–304 to support it. 2️⃣ This fast-tracked the substance vote to Thursday July 9 - the last sitting day before summer recess - where blocking the Council's text required an absolute majority of all 720 MEPs (361 votes), regardless of who showed up. 3️⃣ Result: 113 MEPs (~16% of Parliament) weren't even in the chamber. Every empty seat counted as a de facto vote against rejection. A clear majority of those present voted to reject (314 vs. 276) - but it still wasn't enough. This combination of a lower-threshold urgency vote + a high-threshold substance vote timed for peak absenteeism just before summer recess is what I find procedurally unprecedented and worthy of criticism. The Council didn't need to win the argument. It just needed enough MEPs on a train home. At least the EP did manage to pass amendments explicitly excluding end-to-end encrypted communications (WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage etc.) from the scope of the extension - and those amendments cleared the absolute majority bar. So E2EE remains protected for now unless the Council rejects that as well - then the process would end up end up in inter-institutional conciliation and would take way longer. Something I don't expect given the fact that voluntary scanning is currently illegal, which is what the Council is trying to fix urgently. Plus, this not the end of the discussion around chat control at all. Chat Control 1.0 is a temporary placeholder until 2028 at the latest. The real battleground is Chat Control 2.0 - the permanent regulation still in trilogue negotiations - which could mandate scanning at a far broader scale, potentially including encrypted services. That debate is very much alive and ongoing. To all the people online and offline fighting for privacy - please keep going despite the setback! The permanent rules are still to be set!(Patrick Hansen)