The issue isn't how much free speech online is being punished. It is how surveillance could be used to reinforce authoritarianism.

The UK does a lot of prosecuting people for having said nasty things online that someone else didn't like.

Hungary is far more inclined to surveil political opponents, put people in their network in jail without fair trial, surveil successful businesses whose bribes were insufficient, find excuses to punish those businesses.

Unfortunately, that population immediately equates the two for good reason. Bills that are presented as "for the children" usually are a power grab.

Even more unfortunately, the issue is so emotional that we can't have a reasonable discussion on it. This limits the discussion to proposals that sound good to angry people. And the opposition to those who can get angry about something else. Which limits how much reason is applied on either side.

For example, look at the idea of a national sex offenders registry, like we have in the USA. The existence of such a registry is reasonable given that we're no more successful at stopping people from being pedophiles, than we are at stopping them from being homosexuals.

But the purpose of such a list is severely undermined when an estimated quarter of the list were themselves minors when they offended. The age at which people are most likely to land on the list is 14. But a man who liked 13 year olds when he was 14, is unlikely to reoffend at 30. What is the purpose of ruining the rest of his life for a juvenile mistake?

Such discussions simply can't be had.

Exactly. It is much easier to get people to agree to do questionable things, when there is pressure to "do something".

A more limited bill takes off the pressure to "do something", and therefore makes the more extreme bill harder to pass later.

In this case there is reason to suspect that the real goal of the bill is not catching pedophiles. Instead it is to give police broader powers of surveillance in the name of catching pedophiles, which they will then be able to use for other purposes. This is particularly problematic given the ways that it could be abused by some of the more authoritarian governments in the EU. Yes, I'm thinking of Viktor Orbán of Hungary.

Given the choice between being homeless and living in favelas, millions in Brazil have chosen to live in favelas.

The reality of zoning laws in Western countries is to provide a target for regulatory capture by the NIMBY crowd. With the result that we're systemically underbuilding housing, then wonder why we wound up with homelessness.

In every technology wave so far, we've disrupted many existing jobs. However we've also opened up new kinds of jobs. And, because it is easier to retrain humans than build machines for those jobs, we wound up with more and better jobs.

This is the first technology wave that doesn't just displace humans, but which can be trained to the new job opportunities more easily than humans can. Right now it can't replace humans for a lot of important things. But as its capabilities improve, what do displaced humans transition to?

I don't think that we have a good answer to that. And we may need it sooner rather than later. I'd be more optimistic if I trusted our leadership more. But wise political leadership is not exactly a strong point for our country right now.