On: EU-Commissioned Study Proposes European Firewall [pdf]

They are not even shy to compare their plans to China's great firewall. Goes to show that free speech and democracy has never been and continues not to be a European strong point.

It’s not a proposition from the EU. The EU requested a study, the study group suggested that proposition.

Now the question is: what does the EU do with that proposal?

If they say “fuck yeah, let’s act on that fine suggestion of a European Great Firewall” then I would agree with you, but that’s not the situation.

Such studies are usually intended to give external legitimacy to pre-decided internal plans. So someone had them draw up the study, telling them what the conclusion should be.

There's also the opposite effect - that organisations pretending to be legitimate create "studies" to shift the Overton window a bit. In practice, most of these things go into the circular file anyway. If you go searching on pretty much any topic, there's pretty much all the possible opinions in the form of "studies" for the EC.

Keep in mind this study was commissioned by a work group of the European Parliament, not the EC.

I think the point of this would be to protect the EU IT market from American IT monopolies. Because currently EU is completely dependent on the USA when it comes to IT software and architecture, which is becoming a real problem. China's firewall has been a great success in that regard.

Just like the US is completely dependent on China, Japan and Korea for hardware manufacturing.

Modern reality is that everyone is really dependent on everyone. It's perhaps not ideal from a national security point of view.