From Digital Euro to Chat Control: The Risk of Function Creep

The EU is building the digital architecture of a totalitarian state. Digital control of money, communications, and replacement of parental control.

From The European Conservative

By Javier Villamor

Brussels frames the digital euro, age verification, and Chat Control as separate solutions to real issues, but together they highlight who controls the digital infrastructure shaping everyday life in Europe.

The European Union is building the digital architecture of the future. It is not doing so all at once, nor under a single law. It is doing so in layers: payments, identity, age verification, content moderation, and private communications. Step by step, so the alarm does not go off.

Each new piece of the system arrives with a justification that is difficult to reject on the face of it. The digital euro is presented as monetary sovereignty. Age verification is motivated by child protection. Chat Control is a part of the fight against child sexual abuse. The problem does not necessarily lie in each isolated measure but in the cumulative logic on which they rest.

A recent analysis of the digital euro framed the issue in strategic terms: sovereignty in the 21st century no longer depends only on territory, defence, or political institutions but on who controls the infrastructures that allow the economy to function. The article places the digital euro within that European search for autonomy from private or non-European payment systems, from Visa and Mastercard to Apple Pay or Google Pay.

Europe needs to reduce external dependencies. No serious bloc can leave its payments, energy, raw materials, or technological networks in foreign hands. But that same vector of action takes on a different meaning when it moves from money to identity and privacy.

That is where the risk of what experts call ‘function creep’ appears: a tool created for a legitimate purpose ends up being extended to other uses.

The European Commission announced in April that its new age verification app is ready to be deployed. It will allow users to prove their age when accessing digital platforms, can be set up with a passport or identity document, and some member states already plan to integrate it into their national digital identity wallets. 

Once again, the official argument is reasonable: protecting minors from harmful content, addictive design, harassment, and sexual predators. No one disputes the need to act. The question is what infrastructure is being installed in order to do so.

Chat Control takes that discussion into the most personal territory: private communications. On July 2, the Council of the EU adopted its position to reinstate a provisional measure allowing providers to voluntarily detect and remove child sexual abuse material while a permanent legislative framework is negotiated. The Council itself acknowledges that this is an exception to the data protection rules in electronic communications. The very thing for which fines were imposed for years has now been removed from the equation in the interest of centralisation and control. 

With this and successive changes, under the banner of child protection, a digital surveillance infrastructure could be built that threatens privacy and freedom of communication.

First, an exception for minors. Then, an exception for sexual offences. Then, terrorism. Later, hate or disinformation. Finally, any category that political power defines as a public risk. It is not necessary to attribute authoritarian intent to Brussels today in order to warn of the danger. Infrastructures outlive the intentions of those who create them.

The digital euro raises the question of who controls money. Age verification raises the question of who controls access. Chat Control raises the question of who can inspect private conversations. Separately, each debate looks technical. Together, the picture is very different.

Function creep does not need a revolution. It only needs patience, infrastructure, and good excuses. And Brussels has a surplus of those.