Gaza

It's due to Palantir and co, lobbying various European governments in recent years. Look at which EU governments are Palantir's clients.

Falls somewhere between people not being cool with genocide and greed.

European elites are worried about losing control, and they are responding by restricting freedoms.

The Palestine/Gaza issue is one concrete example: European elites are very pro-Israel and pro-Genocide. But they have completely failed to control the narrative and European populations are not as pro-Israel as their elites.

I do think it's Gaza. For decades until the last couple of years, the plight of Palestinians have been mostly ignored. The whole of Europe and algosphere in the middle east have had active or passive public approval for middle east policy for the past century. Vietnam war reporting soured the public on far east colonialism and war reporting went softball afterwards and that softball unraveled in the 2010s and now Gaza is the modern day Vietnam war for reporting on disregard for life from pretty much ourselves. Israel is an ally of our countries.

So now government policy is incredibly misaligned with public opinion now and what was a steady grind at enacting internet control is suddenly a mad rush for governments. Israel is a line in the sand for the powerful like Vietnam was in the 60/70s was for media control/influence

Centralization tends be self-reinforcing. Social unrest might cause the public to demand more safety measures, which usually come at the expense of freedoms. I’d also wager that the lower the level of trust in government is, the more they want to impose control and authority.

And in the EU specifically it is because lobbyists have been working overtime to try and pass chat control: https://borncity.com/win/2023/09/27/european-union-which-lobby-organizations-are-behind-the-plans-for-chat-control/

This is not solely a european problem, and it's not new.

A faction of conservatives will scream up and down that they're protecting the children. Most people will generally side with privacy.

My suspicion is that the end goal is to classify people to target your opponents, even the ones who don't have much of a platform.

Once you can identify all the anonymous people on the internet and build profiles of all their communications with ML, you can easily generate a list of people who are against your policies and target them. I'm pretty sure you could find other subsets of data linking these people so you can then target them indirectly without too much friendly fire against your supporters.

In the US, One easy target I haven't seen any actions for is Marijuana. All those medical patients are in a database somewhere. All the debit card transactions in stores are in a database somewhere. It's still federally illegal and the punishments are nuts if prosecuted. Take your communications list, and the MJ list, target the ones on both and ignore the rest. You get to legally enslave your opponents under the guise of weed.

Why are so many European countries getting worried about encryption and/or age verification?

EU elites want to hold on to power. They know everything is going to shit economically and politically and there will be backlash for this economic situation, covid, Ukraine, Gaza and everything. So they try to shut down free information and speech by censoring internet and enforcing self censorship to stay in power. Free speech and any civil liberty is on the loan anyway, unless the people are ready push back constantly. These fuckers have no morality or common sense otherwise.

It's a coordinated play, that's why. Their hope and plan is that VPNs become worthless because you're gonna be VPNing into censored countries anyway. They won't want anonymity/pseudo-anonymity like we've had.

For those here who didn't know specifics, as far as I know the EU has announced in July 2025 guidelines, set to come into effect until 2026, that seem to basically be the same as the UK online safety act:

https://www.eunews.it/en/2025/07/14/the-eu-launches-an-online-age-verification-app-pilot-project-in-five-member-states-including-italy/

https://www.mlex.com/mlex/articles/2368265/online-services-get-up-to-12-months-to-apply-age-verification-eu-guidelines-say

https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/dae/redirection/document/118226

These guidelines say, among other things, check the last link: "Where the provider of the online platform has identified medium risks to minors on their platform as established in its risk review [...] and those risks cannot be mitigated by less restrictive measures. The Commission considers this will be the case where the risk is not high enough to require access restriction based on age verification but not low enough that it would be appropriate to not have any access restriction [...]" And "Self-declaration is not considered to be an appropriate age-assurance measure as further explained below."

If you don't want the Online Safety Act in the EU, call or e-mail your representative now. If you enter your country here, it shows a list: https://fightchatcontrol.eu/#delegates As far as I can tell, unless it's reversed this will be coming soon. The clock is ticking.

The Internet has become popular enough that governments care about what happens on it. And it's not just European countries, US states too (at least for age verification).

More specifically for your two points:

Encryption

It used to be that very little Internet traffic was encrypted, much less end-to-end encrypted. After 2013 (Snowden revelations), this changed, e.g. messengers started to E2EE, many more websites than previously started to use HTTPS. So all we are seeing now is the reaction to those positive changes...

Age verification

This has to do with mobile devices more than anything else. I think a lot of parents now just hand their children smartphones or tablets and may then be surprised that their children can then access things they don't want their children to access. This was less of a thing in the desktop era because it was easier to see what children were doing online if it was happening on a huge computer in the living room...

Now personally I don't think anyone (including young people) should ever be prohibited from watching or reading anything they actively want to see. For preventing young people from accidentally accessing porn, an "are you over 18" banner ought to be enough... I don't think people who want to prevent that kind of access want anything legitimate. But you asked about why it's happening now and not at another time and I think this is the answer.

Sidenote: I remember reading that when television was newly introduced in East Germany, it was still able to be somewhat critical of the regime; after some years, this stopped because a lot more citizens were able to watch it. The equivalent of that is currently happening to the Internet.

Authoritarianism

Totalitarianism.

People outside Europe doesn't understand how our governments are speed running getting a totalitarian government. More and more aspects of anyone's everyday life are getting controlled everyday.

Here they are already starting a system of garbage bags with nfc tags to have our garbage controlled.

At the end of the day they are thirsty for power and control.

Because there's a surge of fascism and they think they can get it

It's nothing new, They try to pull some bullshit at least once every decade. In the USA it was the Clipper Chip in the 90s where they said "trust the government with a backdoor" and then it got cracked and they tried very hard to prosecute one of the inventors of PGP... in the 2010s it was SOPA and other bills they tried to pass.

it looks like they're just realizing that they can push it this far and people won't really fight back about it

It's not new. Maybe it's new to you but European conservatives always tried this, at least in Germany. They never missed a chance to try to implement harsher and broader surveillance and have many times had their laws repealed by the federal constitutional court.

Also the chatcontrol laws have been in the making for years in the EU, but over those years they have been reworked or not gotten enough votes again and again.

Now why do conservatives want surveillance? I think it's about control. Just like they believe a father should have ultimate control over his children (be allowed to hit them etc), they think that police shouldn't have to stop at anything while researching a matter.

Also there probably is lobbying by state agencies and those selling surveillance tech and whatnot.

A lot of good points here, but I'd also like to bring forward another hypothesis which partially explain the incredible speed at which this is moving forward in the last few months (even though things have been brewing back and forth for years, decades).

The US has become a hostile state. For Five Eyes, Six Eyes, Nine Eyes, and Forty Eyes that means much less domestic intel since all the Eyes were sharing domestic intelligence to circumvent stronger protections on their own citizens. Canada would spy for the US and the UK, and vice versa, which was a neat way of getting rid of pesky rights afforded to citizens.

We are realistically looking at losing between 200 million and 1 billion people over the next 20 years due to climate-change induced famine and heat stroke. Those are realistic estimates. More optimistic scenarios could make that number less, more pessimistic ones could reduce it. We are on the eve of what future histories may refer to as the Great Hunger.

Even for those lucky enough to not live in regions being rendered uninhabitable, the quality of life for the average citizen is collapsing. The developing world will experience mass famine. The developed world will experience food prices not seen since the advent of mechanized agriculture. Home prices will continue to become more unaffordable, as more and more homes are destroyed by rapidly increasing natural disasters. In the US, tens of millions of homeowners are going to have their primary asset, their homes, rendered completely worthless after they become uninsurable. Governments can try to prop up the insurance market if they want, but not even national governments have the resources to subsidize an insurance market in an era of spiraling natural catastrophes.

Leaders around the world see a future of chaos, famine, and strife. Really all the Four Horseman are coming out. In developed countries, leaders fear millions of desperate poor people from developing countries trying to cross their borders. Internally, they fear violence by their own populations, who are seeing their standard of living rapidly collapse.

The borders are being locked down. The walls are going up. People everywhere are being increasingly surveilled and controlled. Political leaders might be cynical enough to deny climate change for political gain, but that doesn't mean they're ignorant to the actual future we're running headfirst into. Technology is also advancing, allowing "mass shooter" type individuals to potentially cause much larger acts of destruction in the future.

Most governments would prefer to maintain power by actually improving the lives of their citizens. That's the safest and most moral approach. But in a world of rapidly spiraling climate change, governments simply are not capable of on improving the lives of their citizens. They can't even maintain the standard of living their citizens already have. So, the leaders have to turn to more brute force methods to retain control. Best to be loved. But if you can't be loved, then at least be feared.

Sports rights holders ~~are bleeding money due to IPTV~~ got even more greedy and they own the politicians.

I feel it's the same vibe with return to office policy in Canada.

These things seem like they come from absolutely no where with no legitimate reason and then all of these executives are on board making it happen.

Like what the fuck is going on

More than one European prime minister spoke loudly about a coming war. Whether they mean it or it's an excuse to do fascist stuff is another topic. There's also the Russian sabotage going on.

They try to push Chat Control every year for some time now...

Google wants to be the go to for age verification so they can sell it to other websites. They'll also coincidentally control a lot of information on every user. They are fighting for these age verification laws.

https://sh.itjust.works/post/44474550/20509870

Its coordinated nudging from western governments across the world. Europe, Aus, NZ, Canada. Its the same messaging coming out of all of them, digital ID, currency etc. Tin foil hat moment, its a UN/WEF push to have global government. Nudge being a small step at a time so you hardly notice your being boiled. The saving grace is governments push for ever increasing control doesn't allow for human nature.

The USA will go to war with China to keep them in line. My assumption is that like Afghanistan it will be presented as an attack on NATO so the EU will be involved.

People may question the validity of that war which is ok as long as the sentiment doesn't spread. With age verification those critical voices can be silenced easily.

Fascism or at least the police state politicians are getting a lot of funding because information is profitable.