Javier Zarzalejos, chair of the Parliament’s Civil Liberties committee and rapporteur on Chat Control, with Thomas Byrne, Ireland’s Minister of State for European Affairs, presenting the Irish presidency’s priorities to the committee in Brussels, 13 July 2026. Photo: European Parliament, © European Union 2026, Source: EP, Alain Rolland (cropped).
The one chapter of Chat Control 2.0 still open is detection: who may search which messages, for what, and on whose order. The text the negotiators work from is the presidency’s compromise on detection, Council document 9659/26 of 26 May 2026, nine pages of explanation and fifteen of draft articles, in the Council’s public register. Until this week this site knew it only through the presidency’s later summary, document 10499/26. The compromise itself says more.
What it says
The proposal splits the online world in two. “Content that is publicly accessible” is defined as “information that has been made available, at the request of a content provider, to a potentially unlimited number of persons without requiring a human decision or selection of who is granted access”. Everything else that is not encrypted is non-public content; encrypted content is outside both regimes, because the co-legislators have provisionally agreed that the regulation “shall not create any obligation that would require a provider of hosting services or a provider of interpersonal communications services to decrypt data or create access to end-to-end encrypted data, or that would prevent providers from offering end-to-end encrypted services”.
On that map the presidency places four components. Providers may search non-public content on their own initiative, a permanent version of the voluntary regime of the expired interim regulation, extended to hosting services, with a duty to “inform the EU Centre in advance” and a power for national authorities to suspend the searches. National authorities may order detection on publicly accessible content where a hosting service “is being misused for online child sexual abuse to an appreciable extent”, with a procedure that “is less detailed” than the one for private content. For private content, the proposal “is to move away from generalised scanning towards scanning of specific users, without a need for these users to be suspects in the criminal law sense”: an order “shall only be issued if” it “concerns specific users”, there are “clear indications, based on information lawfully acquired, that those specific users are related to child sexual abuse” and “have used the service in the 12 months prior to the request”, and the order is “necessary and proportionate”. Orders would run for at most 24 months for abuse material and 12 months for grooming, issued by “independent administrative authorities and/or judicial authorities” at the request of a Coordinating Authority. The fourth component lets the EU Centre search public content itself. What each component may look for, “known child sexual abuse material (CSAM), new CSAM and/or grooming”, “remains bracketed”.
What happened next
The delegations were asked for their views at the counsellors’ meeting of 10 June 2026, the meeting whose German minutes, published by netzpolitik.org on 12 June, record twelve scrutiny reservations and six of them called positive. On 22 June the presidency told the ambassadors that the Parliament “has remained very critical concerning own-initiative searches by providers on non-publicly accessible content, even for known CSAM” (10499/26). On 7 July it recorded the Parliament as “ready to discuss the building blocks on detection” on two conditions, end-to-end encryption protected and no general monitoring obligation (11501/26). These four components are what the technical meetings of 10 and 18 September and the trilogue of 29 September are about.
What it changes in the record
No position changes. Document 9659/26 joins the sources of the Chat Control Tracker and of Who decides, by name. The positions on Where the 27 governments stand answer one question, whether providers may be ordered to scan everyone’s private messages. The compromise narrows that question to orders against named users on “clear indications” short of suspicion in the criminal sense, and for what; what each government said about that narrower order at the June meetings is on its country page where the minutes record it. A row changes only with a document.
Record notes are short, dated entries: one document, what it says, what it changes on this site. Sources: Council of the EU, presidency compromise texts on detection, document 9659/26, 26 May 2026, public register; presidency note to the Permanent Representatives Committee, document 10499/26, 22 June 2026; presidency note to delegations, document 11501/26, 7 July 2026; netzpolitik.org, German delegation’s minutes of the JHA counsellors’ meeting of 10 June 2026, published 12 June 2026.
