The proposed Chat control EU law will not only seize totalitarian control of all private communication. It will also ban open source operating systems as an unintended consequence.

The EU is currently in the process of enacting the chat control law. It has been criticized for creating an EU-wide centralized mass surveillance and censorship system and enabling government eavesdropping on all private communication. But one little talked about consequence of the proposed law is that it makes practically all existing open source operating systems illegal, including all major Linux distributions. It would also effectively ban the F-Droid open source Android app archive.

Article 6 of the law requires all “software application stores” to:

• Assess whether each service provided by each software application enables human-to-human communication
• Verify whether each user is over or under the age of 17
• Prevent users under 17 from installing such