Another factor is the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Late capitalism has to keep finding more and more shameless ways to squeeze regular people as the easy money recedes. Lobbyists are pushing harder to lock people into a few big services and subscriptions so they are forced to yield more personal data and spending money.

This is not solely a european problem, and it's not new.

A faction of conservatives will scream up and down that they're protecting the children. Most people will generally side with privacy.

My suspicion is that the end goal is to classify people to target your opponents, even the ones who don't have much of a platform.

Once you can identify all the anonymous people on the internet and build profiles of all their communications with ML, you can easily generate a list of people who are against your policies and target them. I'm pretty sure you could find other subsets of data linking these people so you can then target them indirectly without too much friendly fire against your supporters.

In the US, One easy target I haven't seen any actions for is Marijuana. All those medical patients are in a database somewhere. All the debit card transactions in stores are in a database somewhere. It's still federally illegal and the punishments are nuts if prosecuted. Take your communications list, and the MJ list, target the ones on both and ignore the rest. You get to legally enslave your opponents under the guise of weed.

I feel it's the same vibe with return to office policy in Canada.

These things seem like they come from absolutely no where with no legitimate reason and then all of these executives are on board making it happen.

Like what the fuck is going on

It's nothing new, They try to pull some bullshit at least once every decade. In the USA it was the Clipper Chip in the 90s where they said "trust the government with a backdoor" and then it got cracked and they tried very hard to prosecute one of the inventors of PGP... in the 2010s it was SOPA and other bills they tried to pass.

The Internet has become popular enough that governments care about what happens on it. And it's not just European countries, US states too (at least for age verification).

More specifically for your two points:

Encryption

It used to be that very little Internet traffic was encrypted, much less end-to-end encrypted. After 2013 (Snowden revelations), this changed, e.g. messengers started to E2EE, many more websites than previously started to use HTTPS. So all we are seeing now is the reaction to those positive changes...

Age verification

This has to do with mobile devices more than anything else. I think a lot of parents now just hand their children smartphones or tablets and may then be surprised that their children can then access things they don't want their children to access. This was less of a thing in the desktop era because it was easier to see what children were doing online if it was happening on a huge computer in the living room...

Now personally I don't think anyone (including young people) should ever be prohibited from watching or reading anything they actively want to see. For preventing young people from accidentally accessing porn, an "are you over 18" banner ought to be enough... I don't think people who want to prevent that kind of access want anything legitimate. But you asked about why it's happening now and not at another time and I think this is the answer.

Sidenote: I remember reading that when television was newly introduced in East Germany, it was still able to be somewhat critical of the regime; after some years, this stopped because a lot more citizens were able to watch it. The equivalent of that is currently happening to the Internet.

More than one European prime minister spoke loudly about a coming war. Whether they mean it or it's an excuse to do fascist stuff is another topic. There's also the Russian sabotage going on.

It's not new. Maybe it's new to you but European conservatives always tried this, at least in Germany. They never missed a chance to try to implement harsher and broader surveillance and have many times had their laws repealed by the federal constitutional court.

Also the chatcontrol laws have been in the making for years in the EU, but over those years they have been reworked or not gotten enough votes again and again.

Now why do conservatives want surveillance? I think it's about control. Just like they believe a father should have ultimate control over his children (be allowed to hit them etc), they think that police shouldn't have to stop at anything while researching a matter.

Also there probably is lobbying by state agencies and those selling surveillance tech and whatnot.

A lot of good points here, but I'd also like to bring forward another hypothesis which partially explain the incredible speed at which this is moving forward in the last few months (even though things have been brewing back and forth for years, decades).

The US has become a hostile state. For Five Eyes, Six Eyes, Nine Eyes, and Forty Eyes that means much less domestic intel since all the Eyes were sharing domestic intelligence to circumvent stronger protections on their own citizens. Canada would spy for the US and the UK, and vice versa, which was a neat way of getting rid of pesky rights afforded to citizens.

Sports rights holders ~~are bleeding money due to IPTV~~ got even more greedy and they own the politicians.

Google wants to be the go to for age verification so they can sell it to other websites. They'll also coincidentally control a lot of information on every user. They are fighting for these age verification laws.

https://sh.itjust.works/post/44474550/20509870

They try to push Chat Control every year for some time now...

Because people aren't supportive enough of Ukraine and , and they blame the phones

I get the impression that there are a lot of bot answers here. So well articulated, but barely connected to the questions.