I think the author would love to see more enlightened policy, but he doesn’t believe it’s going to happen. Hence the closer: “ Please make my predictions come out wrong.“
Also, these laws don’t simply originate from big tech. That particularly OSINT study was done by someone who wrote their own interpretation of the data points they uncovered, to create a narrative that was comforting to them.
Big tech has been aware that a reckoning was coming, because they and safety advocates have been fighting for years now. The fact that there was no actual teeth or ability to enforce e regulation, and that harms were evolving beyond reason and imagination was general knowledge.
Meta is lobbying to influence the shape of the manacles they know are coming.
That would outlaw programming. It's just not feasible at all, anyone with any kind of tech literacy understands that encryption is here to stay. It's also necessary for the web to function at all for the things we use it for, such as banking.
There is no way to prevent people from communicating in secret. Even if they did strictly control digital communication people would just communicate some other way.