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Look who's joined the anti-encryption posse: Germany, come on down

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

That is the problem, the governments have not thought ahead on this at all.

Another aspect of it is that companies haven't thought about it either. I'll illustrate that point thus:

Fixed and mobile telephony, telegram and postal services, TV, radio and publishing have been heavily regulated by governments all over the world from the very beginning, purely to allow (when necessary) policing of their use. So what on earth was it about the over-the-top services providing similar functionality (WhatsApp, Facebook, YouTube, etc) that made the companies think they'd be immune to such regulation forever?!?!

There's not many excuses. For example, UK law makes it very clear, and very public, what a telephony company is obliged do, and has done for a long time. Maybe it's less clear in other countries, but even so. If you're offering a telephony-like service, don't be surprised if the government eventually catches on and insists on regulating your business...

Things are clearly brewing up for a major intervention into OTT services by governments all over the world. The difficulty the companies face is that regulation is very incompatible with the freetard, data slurping, ad funded business model they've grown fat on, and it will be virtually impossible for some hot new startup to, well, start up.

Worse still, their belligerence in the face of police requests means that the matter will be taken out of their hands by legislators. Laws will be passed and the companies won't have any say at all. If they want to negotiate what new laws governing their businesses look like, the time for doing that was a few years back.

And it's easy for many governments to get such laws through their legislatures. Especially given the companies poor and obstructive responses to police requests following actual terrorist attacks, revelations of private paedophilia groups on Facebook that Facebook didn't do anything about, etc. This is appallingly bad self inflicted publicity for the companies. The PR departments in these companies must dread reading the newspapers some mornings.

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