Why would it be illegal, if I'm not offering it publicly? Is running a VPN between my family computers illegal? Is ssh-ing onto a host and using the talk command illegal?
I suppose only public services, advertised for new users, are the target of the "chat control" directive. You can't join pseudonymously. But joining my VPN-based chat server would require being my acquaintance; should I ask an ID from a person I met at a pub? If so, should I ask their ID before I engage in a small talk with them in the pub?
I don't trust the rhetoric or the motives. Which brings me to the following questions:
Do all of your acquaintances even use VPNs? Because 97,56% of mine don’t. So it's not about you and your friends.
But lets assume for a moment that it's about you and your friends... If this law goes through, what’s to stop them from pushing through a series of follow-up laws forcing every VPN provider include backdoors? Who’s going to stop them? Why stop them? By then, the public will have already given in. No one will care if you or your friends are sentenced to 25 years for using a “non-compliant” (read: secure) VPN. Do you have _something to hide_?
In five years, any provider without a backdoor could easily be branded as “insecure.” We’re already living in a world where words often mean the exact opposite of what they should. Why would this be any different? And from my PoV, why take the risk? Children need safe ways to communicate as much as adults.
The world has more than one country in it. People in free countries have the right and duty to create technologies to the benefit of people in authoritarian countries.
The people in the free countries don't have to physically go somewhere. You do this over the internet, e.g. writing code and publishing it for others to use.
If you live in one of the authoritarian countries and it pretends to be a democracy to a sufficient extent that voting can actually change things, try doing that. If not, your options are pretty much "apply for the passport" or "sharpen your weapons".
