Open letter: 40+ European companies oppose the EU's “Chat Control” proposal, which would force services to scan messages for CSAM, fearing a backdoor mandate
Today we are adding our signature (and that of our parent company XWiki SAS) to a new open letter against the so-called “Chat Control” EU regulation.
Context & Ripple Effects
XWiki SAS and CryptPad join a coordinated industry intervention against a proposed EU message-scanning regime. The position echoes earlier expert criticism of mandatory CSAM scanning as incompatible with broader privacy and democratic concerns.
The company letter appears alongside a separate campaign directing public opposition to EU lawmakers, showing that resistance is being organized through both industry and citizen channels.
First-order effects
- More than 40 European signatories publicly align against mandatory message scanning, increasing the proposal’s visible opposition among affected service providers.
- XWiki SAS and CryptPad make privacy-preserving communications a declared policy position, rather than treating the issue as a purely technical compliance question.
Second-order effects
- Messaging and collaboration providers face stronger incentives to distinguish their services by how they protect encrypted communications and resist scanning mandates.
- EU lawmakers must weigh a more coordinated supplier backlash alongside public campaigning, complicating efforts to frame scanning requirements as a narrow safety measure.
Third-order effects
- The dispute reinforces a structural collision between content-enforcement mandates and end-to-end encryption: regulation increasingly determines which privacy architectures remain viable in a market.
- If opposition continues to unite smaller European providers as well as larger platforms, voluntary or less prescriptive enforcement approaches may become more politically durable than blanket scanning requirements.
The trend: This is one data point in the widening contest over whether online-safety rules can be enforced without making private-message services into regulated inspection points.