Germany · de.indymedia · · 3h
Chat control negotiations: EU states and parliament still at odds
Deutsch (original) · Auto-translated to English
The tug of war over chat control continues in the trilogue negotiations between the Commission, Council and Parliament. There was no agreement in the most recent round. There are still a number of sticking points left.
At the sixth political trilogue negotiations on the CSA regulation in Brussels on Tuesday, there was no agreement on the key issue of scanning private chats. There were only agreements with the “EU Center for the Protection of Children from Sexual Abuse”,https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20260930IPR47837/comba...the rapporteur Javier Zarzalejos announced. In addition to the political rounds, there are also technical negotiations.
What was particularly controversial was the conditions under which online services can or should scan users' private, unencrypted content. Among other things, the Irish Council Presidency presented a proposal to permanently anchor voluntary and time-limited chat control in law in an adapted form.
The following is being negotiated: On the one hand, the so-called voluntary chat control should be implemented into regular operations. This is controversial because monitoring private content is actually prohibited and is only possible through time-limited exceptions. Most recently, the voluntary chat control expired in the spring and could only be done with onehttps://netzpolitik.org/2026/eu-parlament-freiwillige-chatkontrolle-gehen...revivedbecome.
The regulation is intended to be incorporated into the CSA regulation (CSA stands for “child sexual abuse”), which has been in place sincehttps://netzpolitik.org/2022/gesetz-gegen-kindesabuse-eu-commission...2022 is on the table– and most of them under the name “https://netzpolitik.org/tag/chatkontrolle/">Chat control" is known. The original draft of the EU Commission also contained thishttps://netzpolitik.org/2022/eu-plaene-einfach-erklaert-warum-die-chatko...End-to-end encrypted contentusing client-side scanning. However, both reject thishttps://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/de/press-room/20231110IPR10118/child..., as well as, after years of negotiations, thehttps://netzpolitik.org/2025/eu-rat-reinigung-sich-zur-chatkontrolle-schlim...changein the council.
Little controversy over publicly accessible content
Some points have already been resolved when it comes to content in publicly accessible digital spaces, such as images in publicly accessible cloud storage or social media. The planned EU center should be able to search there on its own and detect both known and new abuse material.
As before, online services should be allowed to voluntarily search for known depictions of abuse and what is called child pornography in Germany. The main data basis here so far has been:https://netzpolitik.org/tag/ncmec/">NCMEC database.
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What is controversial in the negotiations is whether the services can be required to scan. It was also discussed whether such discovery orders should be issued by independent courts or administrative authorities and which services exactly this applies to.
Private communication is much more sensitive
This would also affect the scanning of non-public content, including private, unencrypted communication. In such cases, whether voluntary or ordered, this would have to be linked to so-called “search plans”. This term is now appearing again in the trilogue negotiations - and according to a document from September 23rd, which is available to netzpolitik.org, even the German negotiators on the side of the EU countries are not clear about what is behind it, which is why they rejected these search plans in advance.
In these “search plans,” online services are apparently intended to outline what technology they will use to detect abusive material and what protective measures they will put in place to avoid errors.
There is also a dispute over how targeted such search plans and detection orders should be: The compromise proposal on the table is that they should be allowed to target “specific parts of an online service or, if possible, individual users”. That comes from onehttps://cdn.netzpolitik.org/wp-upload/2026/09/2026-09-18_Council_Preside...with which the Council Presidency entered into the negotiations.
The Council is therefore urging that the number of abusive content detected does not fall below the level currently achieved with voluntary chat control. The concern is that if only individual users were specifically monitored, this number could possibly fall.
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Crucial point: Mandatory or voluntary
The council would like to delete the so-called discovery orders from the law; in the negotiations it is against mandatory scanning and favors voluntary chat control.
Parliament, on the other hand, would like to stick to the mandatory disclosure orders, but proceed as targeted as possible - although an agreement is still pending as to whether this should apply to individual users, groups of users or parts of a service.
In addition, Parliament wants to oblige online services that independently search for abusive content to limit this to content that is already known and stored in the EU center's database. Online services would have to be connected to this database in order to be able to search.
It is still unclear when the negotiations will continue. The next negotiation date for the political trilogue has not yet been scheduled.
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Source: de.indymedia