If they wanted to make browsers less secure, they would do so in much more obvious ways.

The new proposal demands browsers automatically trust government created root certificates. That means any EU government can do a man-in-the-middle attack on any end user running that web browser, even users in other countries. There is no reason to do that other than to spy on people or to manipulate the content that they're viewing.

If any government, or company for that matter, wants to make their own root cert and deploy it to all their users/machines they can already do that easily. A lot of companies that work with sensitive data already do this, and some companies (ex: symantec) provide solutions to do it very easily, so the IT team can see everything the users are doing.

I doubt they care about CT checks per se, they’re just afraid that Digicert fucking up will break their critical government services.

Right... uh. Listen, my government used a local/regional CA. Do you want to know what happened? My government got the privilege to emergency re-issue all of their TLS certificates with a different CA because the local/regional CA forgot to renew its own CA certificate. Everything was down. Government websites, government services, eID SSO authentication, etc. You had one job!

Why would the secret services need a front company?

Governments here must use public tenders to buy services, and they pick the offer with the lowest price. Secret services can eat operational costs to place an extraordinarily competitive bid, but governments usually have anti-spying regulations. Hence, secret services bid with front companies.

But why bid in the first place, you may ask? eGovernment services are an attractive target due to the sensitive information at stake, and the potential to influence laws related to the eGovernment services. Secret services implement eGovernment services in a way that allows them to gain intelligence.

But how can they implement services in such a way, you may ask? Ask forgiveness, not permission. Of course, bullshit justifications play an important role here. E2EE? Why do that? Do you not want to scan files that go through the system for viruses? Real justification for why De-Mail stores sensitives emails in plaintext.

Governments now have the following options:

• Discard their paid work and forget about the initiative.
• Discard their paid work and contract someone more expensive than the original bidder.
• Pass laws to allow how the insecure service operates.

Remember De-Mail? Yeah, that exists. Exceptions that allow insecure storage of sensitive emails as long as it's De-Mail. Exceptions that allow De-Mail providers to send legally binding emails on behalf of everyone. No, I'm serious. If anybody comprises De-Mail providers, they can practically send legally binding emails on behalf of everyone, as long as they don't leave behind any trails of course.

But sometimes, like here I suspect, secret services hit the jackpot. They've got such an insecure implementation that the laws required to allow the service to operate nullifies the security of a large portion of the internet. Now, if enforced, they can intercept traffic like they used to back when everyone ran on http without the s. SIGINT is dead, long live SIGINT!