> I expect at some point the EU digital ID will be required to use when accessing the internet or perhaps when signing up for email, creating a Twitter account and such.

I'm not going into the debate about whether there's an ulterior motive, but current eID solutions in various EU countries are considerably less draconian than what you're describing. The current solutions are going to tie into the new one, after all.

In Finland, as an example, we simply have a chip with a cert/key on ID cards. People without card readers or who don't want to use them are free to use their netbanking logins instead. Being able to use the same solution in other EU countries is of rather limited value to most, but it will ease up paperwork submission when travelling, moving to another member state, and so on.

Problem is that if an ID system is ever established and becomes ubiquitous, a quick change in legislature can force online services to leverage the ID. Protection of intellectual property, CSAM, a pretext is easily found. Happens faster than you can blink and than the free internet in Europe would quickly die. The best protection against that is to have alternative ID systems or just anonymous usage if no transactions are involved.

And a lot of services would be fine to use a state ID because they can tie their advertising to a real and unique person. To secure against that the smart move is to reject the little convenience here for longtime benefit.

Pretty much whole of EU already has some form of government ID (not sure if there are any exceptions, but if they are they are not many).

People are used to them, so it's really just a matter of time, before it goes digital.

I don't disagree with your observations, I just think its a forgone conclusion at this point.

That said I think the value lies in creating new non centralized (and less popular) solutions. They will probably never have mass appeal, but at least they will be there for people who want/need them.

Yes, sadly even with fingerprints in the newest version which is completely ludicrous and we have it because some countries needed to implement it for domestic self-gratification. There are regional differences but here nobody uses their government ID for online services.

As long as we have democracy, we can vote on any party we want, also on the ones that would take our own country out of EU.

So unless you can show me how a move away from democracy can happen, we won't turn into china soon.

Democracy didn't really protect use from intelligence agencies sniffing communication data, so I don't see how it would protect anything. Not an intrinsic fault of democracy since the EU still has deficits here.