If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Apple spent years arguing that the App Store on your iPhone is somehow five different stores, and a European court has now told the company what most people already assumed. It doesn’t buy it. The General Court of the European Union in Luxembourg threw out all three of Apple’s legal challenges on July 8, upholding the company’s status as a gatekeeper under the Digital Markets Act. The ruling keeps Apple bound by the rules it has fought hardest against, the ones forcing it to open iOS to rival app stores, allow sideloading so people can use whatever apps they want, and let competing services connect to its own. We obtained a copy of the order for you here.  Apple has tried to make all this a clever piece of accounting. Apple never denied it was big. Since 2024 the company has insisted it runs five separate App Stores rather than one, a distinct storefront for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, and the Apple Watch. Split the empire into five smaller pieces and, so the theory went, only the iPhone store would clear the size thresholds that trigger the DMA. Everything else would slip loose. The judges weren’t persuaded. “Irrespective of the devices in question,” they wrote, “those stores have the same purpose, namely to connect app developers with end users in order to facilitate the distribution of software applications.” The differences Apple leaned on came down to the hardware, and the court found that hardware alone does not turn one storefront into five. The European Commission first tagged Apple as a gatekeeper in September 2023, covering the App Store, iOS, and the Safari browser. Gatekeeper status lands on the largest platforms between businesses and their customers, and it carries obligations meant to stop those platforms from rigging the game for themselves. Apple has treated the label as an existential threat ever since. Apple’s response reached for the words it always reaches for. “We firmly believe the DMA’s mandate goes beyond what is lawful and proportionate, threatening to erode decades of privacy and security protections we’ve built and leaving our users vulnerable to new risks,” an Apple spokesperson said. “We will continue advocating for the innovation and privacy our European customers deserve.” The protections Apple describes are the same walls that stop users from installing software Apple hasn’t blessed, and that route every purchase through the store Apple controls. Security and lock-in have always traveled together in Cupertino’s telling, and the DMA tries to pull them apart, to let people load a store Apple would rather they never see. Calling that vulnerability is a choice. iMessage was the one place Apple came away with something, though not the outcome it wanted. The court ruled Apple’s challenges over iMessage inadmissible. The Commission had classified the service as a number-independent interpersonal communications service, then decided in February 2024 not to designate iMessage as a gatekeeper. Because iMessage was never named an “important gateway,” the DMA’s obligations never attached to it. The classification, the judges wrote, “does not, by itself, produce binding legal effects that bring about a change in Apple’s legal position.” There was nothing to appeal, because nothing had been imposed. Apple can still take the App Store ruling to the Court of Justice of the European Union, the bloc’s highest court, on points of law. It has two months and ten days to file. Given how much money and lawyering the company has thrown at resisting the DMA, another appeal seems all but certain. For anyone who wants the freedom to install what they choose on hardware they own, the decision holds the line. Apple’s five-store gambit failed, iOS stays open to competition under European law, and the idea of a walled garden as a privacy feature took another hit in open court. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Apple Loses EU App Store Gatekeeper Appeal appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Governments now have a template for policing who gets online, and it arrived dressed as child health advice. French President Emmanuel Macron and World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus published a joint statement on July 1 that recasts social media, gaming, and generative AI as forces acting directly on children’s bodies and minds. The two men want mandatory age checks (which means ID checks), mandated platform redesigns, and safety-by-design rules written into law across much of the democratic world. Their case rests on the idea of an emerging agreement between nations. “these measures reflect a growing global consensus that digital environments require effective governance, age-appropriate design, and stronger safeguards to protect child health,” they wrote, gesturing at the wave of national restrictions now spreading from Canberra to Ottawa. Consider what age verification actually demands. To confirm that a user is old enough, a platform first has to confirm who that user is. Matching a claimed birthday against a face scan, a credit record, or a government ID converts an ordinary login into an identity checkpoint. Systems built to keep children out end up cataloging the adults who stay in, since no platform can gauge the age of its teenage users without also weighing the age of everyone else who shows up. Like most of this ilk, the statement frames this as protection, not surveillance. Macron and Tedros describe digital spaces as determinants of health on par with clean water or safe housing, and they warn that infinite scrolling, autoplay, and push notifications are engineered to hook young users. “Solutions are needed because digital environments are not neutral,” they wrote. The remedy they reach for runs straight through identity. Their own text names the danger. “The collection and use of personal data, particularly for profiling and targeted marketing, raise concerns about privacy, manipulation, and well-being,” the statement reads. The leaders then prescribe age-assurance regimes that require platforms to harvest more identifying data from more people, handing companies and governments a fresh reason to know exactly who sits behind every account. A roster of governments is already building these gates. Australia now bars anyone under 16 from holding a social media account, the first national ban of its kind. France is pushing legislation to lock out users under 15. Indonesia has banned access for children under 16, Spain has announced plans to follow, and Ireland is working with European Union partners on age-assurance systems aimed at under-16s. The United Kingdom intends to stop platforms from serving under-16s while adding limits on livestreaming and contact from strangers, and Canada has introduced its own bill to restrict access for children under 16 and force stronger safety-by-design duties onto platforms. Generative AI gets the same treatment, and here the two invoke caution as a governing principle. They argue that the technology multiplies the risks facing young people and that its long-term effect on empathy, self-regulation, and children’s expectations of real relationships remains unclear. “…a precautionary approach is not anti-innovation. It is pro-child,” they wrote. Caution aimed at machines becomes surveillance aimed at users once the enforcement mechanism is a mandatory identity check. Macron and Tedros insist they are defending children’s dignity. “Our children and young people are not experimental subjects, a captive market, or a commodity,” they wrote. That principle cuts both ways. An internet that demands your legal identity at the door treats every user as a suspect to be screened, and it hands that screening power to the same platforms and states that it claims to distrust. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post France and WHO Push Social Media ID Checks appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. There is a particular kind of American who believes, somewhere deep in the region of the ribs, that censorship is a thing that happens elsewhere. Under other flags. To other people, the ones stuck with the shakier constitutions. And then one ordinary morning he finds himself in Middlesex County, New Jersey, reading about a judge who has ordered a newspaper to delete a video, forbidden its editor from describing what the video shows, and handed down all of these commands without once bothering to press play. That is roughly where Charlie Kratovil has been living for the past month, and the remarkable thing is how little has moved. On July 7, Superior Court Judge Thomas Daniel McCloskey again declined to lift the order forcing New Brunswick Today to scrub school surveillance footage from its website and its YouTube channel. He would rule, he said, “within a day or two.” It is the kind of sentence you suspect he has said before. The censorship, in the meantime, stays precisely where it is. You will want to know what this menace to the public consists of. The footage shows a 16-year-old walking into New Brunswick High School, setting off a metal detector, and being surrounded by security officers who relieve him of what appears to be a BB gun. Kratovil published it on May 28, having obtained it from a confidential source, and the board of education sued him the following day, which tells you something about how the board of education likes to spend its mornings. By May 29, which is quick work by any standard, McCloskey had ordered the video deleted, barred Kratovil from writing about the incident, and prohibited him from so much as describing what the footage contained. He did all of it, he admitted, without having watched it. There is a certain confidence required to censor a thing sight unseen, and the judge, to his credit, possessed it in full. Now, there is a name for a government body reaching into a newsroom and stopping the press before the public gets a look. It is called a prior restraint, and the Supreme Court has long regarded it as the heaviest hand the state can lay on the First Amendment, permissible only in the rarest of cases. Kratovil’s lawyers made this point with the weary patience of people explaining something that really ought not to require explaining. “The United States Supreme Court has repeatedly made it clear that prior restraints are the least tolerable infringement on First Amendment rights,” they wrote, adding that “ordering content to be removed from the internet and enjoining future publications are unequivocally prior restraints that must be analyzed under the prior restraint doctrine, which this Court ignored.” The district has decided this is a story about student privacy. The trouble is that the statutes in question govern how a school handles its own records; they have exactly nothing to say about what a newspaper may print, and neither of the two laws the board cited applies to journalists in the first place. This is a gap you could drive a school bus through, and board attorney Robert Mahoney attempted to fill it with one of the more inventive sentences ever offered in defense of deleting journalism. “The board is not acting as an editor, Your Honor, the law acts as an editor,” he said, arguing that state and federal rules “make it absolutely clear that student records are confidential.” He warned that “people could do great harm” with the security details visible in the video. One pictures the nation’s criminal masterminds huddled over the footage, at last unlocking the ancient secret of the walk-through metal detector. But there is a reason this particular video, and no other, had to disappear. When the lockdown happened, the district told parents it was running a “security drill,” and somehow forgot to mention that a student had been arrested for bringing a weapon onto campus. The footage declines to cooperate with this version of events. Kratovil’s lawyer Bruce Rosen put it plainly. “This involves the credibility of the board,” Rosen said. “The first thing they did was they lied, they claimed that it was a routine drill.” Kratovil sees the lawsuit as simply more of the same. “We have a problem in our school system with bullying and unfortunately it starts at the top,” he said after Tuesday’s hearing. “The board of education is continuing to bully New Brunswick Today and trying to force us to participate in their cover-up.” There is one more thing the district would very much like to know, which is how Kratovil got the tape at all. Superintendent Aubrey Johnson wrote in an affidavit that “the district has reason to believe that the footage was recorded from a computer by an individual with access to the district’s surveillance system and disseminated without authorization.” New Jersey’s shield law exists precisely so that reporters cannot be marched into court and made to burn their sources, and Kratovil has declined, politely and firmly, to say where the video came from. The rest reads like a map of closing doors. Kratovil’s attorneys asked the Appellate Division to intervene on June 5 and were turned away on a technicality. They filed a motion to dissolve the restraints with the trial court on June 10, then ran emergency motions past both the Appellate Division and the New Jersey Supreme Court when McCloskey was in no hurry to hear them. One after another, the doors shut. And the video has stayed offline the entire time, which is the entire point of an order like this one. Silence a story long enough and the moment simply passes, ruling or no ruling. So here we are. The footage remains censored. The gag on Kratovil holds. And a judge who has still never watched the video gets to decide whether the rest of us ever will. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post NJ Judge Censors News Video He Admits He Never Watched appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Europe’s biggest platforms can once again scan your messages without a warrant or any reason to suspect you of anything. The European Parliament revived a mass-surveillance regime on Thursday that its own members had already voted down in March, and it passed even with fewer MEPs backing it than opposing it. The count on the measure known as Chat Control 1.0 came in at 314 against, 276 in favor, and 17 abstentions. More members voted to kill the regulation than to keep it, and it became law regardless, a version of democracy that would surprise most of the people living under it. Because the European People’s Party forced the proposal back as a second reading, blocking it no longer took a simple majority of the room but an absolute majority of the entire Parliament, 361 of all 720 seats, counted whether a member turned up or not. That threshold made absence decisive. The vote landed on the final sitting day before summer recess, a date when much of Parliament has historically already left Strasbourg for home, and under an absolute-majority rule every empty seat weighs against the side trying to reach 361. The 314 who showed up to reject the regulation were not outvoted by a larger camp in favor, since only 276 wanted it. They fell 47 votes short of a bar set by the size of the whole chamber rather than the size of the vote. The contrast with the spring tells the rest of the story. When Parliament last ruled on this in March, defeating the extension needed only a simple majority, and 311 against, 228 in favor, with 92 abstentions, was enough to sink it and let the regime lapse in April. This week a slightly larger bloc, 314, voted the same way and lost. The will of Parliament did not shift between March and July. The procedure and the calendar did and that was enough to overturn the result. Arithmetic handed the tech industry the outcome it wanted. Warrantless scanning of private communications is legal again across the bloc until 2028. Parliament did attach an exemption for encrypted communications, a gesture that costs nothing given that providers were not scanning encrypted chats anyway. A more substantive attempt failed. A move to restrict scanning to people a court had already flagged as suspects drew even stronger support, 322 to 255, and still collapsed against the same 361-vote wall. What survived was the broadest, most industry-friendly version on offer, one that monitors everyone’s messages by default and asks judicial permission for none of it. Dr. Patrick Breyer, civil rights activist and former Member of the European Parliament, sent a statement to Reclaim The Net. “The fact that Chat Control is moving forward against the will of the majority of voting MEPs is a farce and damages democracy. Our children are the real losers in this undemocratic process. The passage of a genuine, permanent child protection regulation is now in serious jeopardy. The Council will never agree to a desperately needed paradigm shift as long as they can simply stick to the old approach of suspicionless scanning at the whim of the tech industry.” He framed the loss as temporary. “Today’s vote on the interim regulation was a setback, but the political battle over the permanent ‘Chat Control 2.0’ is just getting started. The resistance we saw in Parliament today was so strong that finding a majority for permanent, suspicionless mass scanning in future negotiations is a complete pipe dream.” His objection actually runs deeper than mere procedure. “Trying to protect children with suspicionless mass surveillance is like frantically mopping the floor while the faucet is still running. Blanket chat control is just as unacceptable as indiscriminately opening everyone’s physical mail. For five years, this failed system has served as a smokescreen to delay real action, all while overwhelming the police with false alarms. We need more child protection, not less—but we need effective protection, not the illusion of security.” The reinstated regime holds until 2028 or until governments and Parliament agree on a permanent replacement, with negotiations set to resume in September. The dispute there turns on a single question that has divided Parliament, the member states, and the Commission for years, which is whether the scanning of private chats should cover everyone or reach only criminal suspects. US companies regain permission to scan private messages with no warrant and no prior suspicion, covering direct messages on Instagram, Discord, Snapchat, Skype, and Xbox, along with email through Gmail and iCloud. A good deal stays untouched by the vote, because public social posts and cloud-stored files were already scannable without this law, and authorities could always act on user reports or seek a court-ordered wiretap aimed at an actual suspect. The case for calling any of this child protection thins out under the numbers. Suspected abuse reports from the US have fallen by half since 2022 as encryption has spread, according to figures the EU Commission itself published. Those same figures show that scanning private chats produced only 36 percent of abuse reports in 2024, with public posts and cloud storage accounting for the rest. Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office found that 48 percent of incoming alerts were not criminally relevant at all, and crime statistics show that 40 percent of the resulting investigations landed on minors themselves. Around 99 percent of the reports Meta generates involve material already known to authorities, which does little to interrupt abuse that is still happening. The Commission concedes there is no evidence that suspicionless scanning has raised the number of convictions or rescued a single additional child. All of which makes the warnings about a looming “protection gap” hard to take at face value. The tools that actually catch offenders, meaning court-ordered wiretaps, user reports, and the scanning of public platforms and cloud storage, were never on the table and remain fully in force. The only practice banned since April was the indiscriminate, warrantless searching of innocent people’s private, unencrypted messages on a handful of US platforms, and that is exactly what Parliament just switched back on. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post EU Brings Back Chat Surveillance, Even As More MEPs Vote No appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.

This Post is for Paid Supporters Reclaim your digital freedom. Get the latest on censorship and surveillance, and learn how to fight back. Subscribe Already a supporter? Sign In. The post The End of the Password, and the Traps on the Way Out appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.