Eurobloat #0027 • July 2012
July 2012 opened with a bailout-bound island taking charge of Europe and closed with a central banker pledging unlimited money he had not yet invented. In between, Brussels found time to design its own tax, reopen a fight with Microsoft and centralise medicine.
Folly of the Month: Cyprus takes the wheel, hand outstretched
On 1 July the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union passed to Cyprus, an island one third occupied by Turkish troops, run by a communist president, and which had formally applied for a bailout six days earlier. So the body meant to broker Europe's finances was now chaired by a member queueing for European charity, sketching its first finance ministers' meeting while angling for soft terms on its own rescue. The Union calls this the honest-broker presidency. Everyone else could see the broker had his hand out.
→ loc.gov
1. Parliament rejects ACTA, having helped negotiate it
On 4 July MEPs threw out the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement by 478 votes to 39, the first time Parliament had killed an international treaty. A welcome blow against a vague pact that menaced citizens' liberties, though one might ask who spent years negotiating the thing before discovering, after 2.8 million signatures, that it was a menace.
2. Brussels fixes the price of your holiday phone call
From 1 July new Union caps came into force, dictating that a roamed call cost no more than 29 cents a minute, a text 9 cents and a megabyte of data 70 cents. The Commission insists only it could deliver cheaper phone bills, which is generous, given it spent years presiding over the expensive ones it now claims to be heroically abolishing.
3. Draghi promises whatever it takes
On 26 July, with Spanish and Italian yields threatening to break the euro apart, Mario Draghi told a London conference the ECB stood ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the single currency, adding, believe me, it will be enough. Markets calmed instantly, which tells you the euro was being held together less by sound finances than by one man's improvised sentence about money that did not yet exist.
4. The Union starts drafting itself a tax
At Council meetings on 22 June and 10 July it became clear that a financial transaction tax would never win unanimous backing, so eleven member states resolved to press ahead by enhanced cooperation instead. The original plan had earmarked the proceeds as an own resource for the Brussels budget, which is the real point. The Union has long wanted a tax of its very own, and a stalled vote was never going to stop it.
5. Spain signs for one hundred billion euros
On 20 July eurozone finance ministers approved a memorandum of understanding lending Spain up to 100 billion euros to recapitalise its broken banks. Brussels supervised the conditions, approved the restructuring under state-aid rules and graded the homework, the schoolmaster collecting another pupil. The vicious circle between banks and sovereigns was to be broken by lending sovereigns yet more money to prop up their banks.
→ economy-finance.ec.europa.eu
6. The Court rules your downloads are yours to resell
On 3 July the Court of Justice held in UsedSoft v Oracle that the right to control distribution of software is exhausted at first sale, even when the program was merely downloaded, so a buyer may resell a used licence. A rare instance of Luxembourg siding with the owner of a thing over the firm that wished to license it forever, hedged, naturally, with conditions about deleting your own copy first.
7. Brussels reopens the Microsoft browser saga
On 17 July the Commission opened proceedings against Microsoft for failing to show European users a browser choice screen, an omission that had run, unnoticed by the Commission's own monitors, for fourteen months. The episode would later produce a 561 million euro fine. Brussels had spent years policing which little icons appear on a Windows machine, then failed to notice when its cherished icons quietly vanished.
8. The single patent stalls over who gets to judge it
On 2 July Parliament postponed its vote on the unitary patent after the European Council tried to delete three articles to curb the Court of Justice's role in patent disputes. The rapporteur warned the Council's move would itself infringe Union law. Decades in the making, and the great single patent was felled by a turf war over which body in which city got to sit in judgment.
9. One portal to trial them all
On 17 July the Commission proposed a regulation to repeal the 2001 clinical trials directive and route every application through a single EU portal with a single coordinated assessment. The pitch was less red tape, the method was to pull approval of medical research up to the Union level and out of national hands. Brussels rarely simplifies anything without quietly moving the controls a little closer to itself.
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