EU's Expired Chat Control Law Made No Difference to Abuse Reports

The BKA fielded 91,242 NCMEC reports in the first five months of 2026, averaging over 18,000 per month, and the expiration of the EU's interim chat control regulation in April didn't meaningfully change that number.

BKA Data Shows No Blind Flight

NCMEC monthly report totals dropped from 20,888 in January to 14,463 in May. But the BKA itself admits this fall sits within normal monthly variance and says, in an official response to netzpolitik.org, "A concrete connection with the expiry of the interim regulation cannot be established at this time." That directly contradicts the agency's earlier warning that losing the voluntary scanning regime would cause a "drastic decline" in leads.

Around 40% of those NCMEC reports turn out to be not criminally relevant - meaning hundreds of non-illegal flagged communications get passed to law enforcement each day, as MdB Donata Vogtschmidt noted. The false-positive rate alone should give anyone pause before demanding broader mandatory scanning.

Big Tech Scans Anyway

Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Snap publicly announced they would continue scanning user content even after the interim regulation expired. They lean on the EU's Digital Services Act or their own terms of service as alternative legal grounds. So the technical infrastructure that generates these reports never went dark. The legislative hand-wringing about a "blind flight" was just that - hand-wringing.

INHOPE hotlines and BKA's own investigations add additional reporting channels. The data makes clear: voluntary scanning worked perfectly well without a dedicated EU mandate.

EU Parliament President Bypasses Democracy

Roberta Metsola, President of the European Parliament, is now pushing for a second reading of the same regulation that Parliament voted down twice. She asked EU states last week whether they want to proceed with the Council's first-reading position - a procedural maneuver that Cyprus's own minute described as "unprecedented."

Green shadow rapporteur Markéta Gregorová called the move "inacceptable" and said it "undermines the position of the European Parliament." Liberal shadow rapporteur Hilde Vautmans called it a "political dead end."

Tomorrow the EU's Permanent Representatives Committee will discuss Metsola's proposal, while parallel trilogue talks continue on the permanent CSA Regulation that could mandate chat scanning rather than merely permit it. The data from the BKA undercuts the entire rationale for both laws.

Source: Auch ohne Gesetz: Weiterhin massenhaft Hinweise auf Kindesmissbrauch
Domain: netzpolitik.org