alt Hacker News> They're going to try to gradually push laws to make it so that you'll need a government issued signature to do anything. That's when they'll have total power over you because they can simply refuse to issue.
The more this signature is necessary the harder it becomes to deny issueing it to somebody.
I don't see how this changes much compared to nowadays. You can already require an ID for all kinds of these and the government already has total control over those. So what changes? China manages to ruin the lives of the people illegally born under the 1-child-policy for decades already, all without systems like eIDAS.
You can't protect yourself from authoritarian regimes with tech or good policy since those will just get ignored. Look at Trumps war with Iran, where did Congress agree to it?
I'm not a fan of these systems either, I also think software should be open and no vendor lock-in should exist. But I don't think this will change much to be honest.
It will matter a lot in the long run. I will outline one concrete way it will matter, which I think is the most critical, but there are other ways it will do damage besides this:
Right now, physical ID is only required for government services, for the most part. But digital signatures can be extended later to gate all services and purchases, both online and physical, including non-government ones. For example, you can't host a website without a gov approved signature for each website.
Under a system like that, you would rarely find out when the gov refuses to issue a signature, or when any kind of injustice happens, really. Websites where people can talk about bad things happening to them will simply be denied a signature to legally operate, so they're given the ultimatum to "voluntarily" censor posts, or be shut down. It becomes impossible to have this very conversation on a public platform with any kind of meaningful reach. And they already have this kind of system in China, since you brought it up. In fact, they have domestic surveillance systems that make the Snowden disclosures look cute.