How does chat control impact nostr if passed? (Seems likely)
Discussion
Mostly not at all, it only targets commercial actors. Primal might need to do something like geoblock EU. FOSS is a great way to bypass this bad legislation if it does come to pass. SimpleX will also be unaffected.
Also worth noting the vote June 19 is just the council of ministers vote - It won't be law until negotiated with parliament, which is broadly against chat control.
Why is FOSS a great way to bypass this legislation? We are to believe it would apply to some and not others and won’t trickle down to everyone?
Two reasons: First of all in the current law developers/users are not obliged to do anything, only commercial actors. Second of all, even if they where, it's unenforceable. There's no way to make i.e. SimpleX add backdoors without gatekeeping what software you can write or run, which is clearly unconstitutional in many EU countries, not to mention impractical. The current legislation may also violate fundamental rights for that matter, but we'll only see it challenged in court if it passes. So at least my understanding is that nostr would be mostly unaffected.
Please don't misunderstand me as not caring about Chat Control though - I think it's a really bad law and should be repealed so that i.e. Signal and Proton can keep serving the EU. It's good that there are E2EE companies, it makes it way more normie accessible.
They just rename chatcontrol, retrying until it goes thru.