Eurobloat #0077 • September 2016
Three months after Britain voted to leave, the Union gathered itself, looked hard at the wreckage, and concluded that the cure for too much Europe was a great deal more of it. September brought a defence fund, a military headquarters, free public wifi, a tax on hyperlinks, and a roaming policy so badly drawn that the Commission President had to delete it himself.
Folly of the Month: A Europe that defends, whether you asked for it or not
On 14 September Jean-Claude Juncker stood before Parliament to deliver his State of the Union and announced that soft power was no longer enough. The remedy was a European Defence Fund to, in his words, turbo-boost military research, plus a permanent European military headquarters that the member states had somehow forgotten to ask for. The lesson Brussels drew from one country voting to leave was that the other twenty-seven needed deeper integration, a common army structure and a louder anthem. Nothing says a Europe that protects quite like building institutions nobody requested while the relocation scheme you already run collapses on schedule.
1. The link tax arrives
The same speech delivered the Copyright in the Digital Single Market proposal, published on 14 September, complete with Article 11, a charge for daring to quote a headline, and Article 13, which obliged platforms to install automated upload filters to police what you post. A scheme to make the internet smaller, dearer and more surveilled, sold to you as supporting journalism.
2. Free wifi, terms and conditions apply
Juncker also promised WiFi4EU, free wireless internet in every European village and town square by 2020, backed by 120 million euros of your money. The catch, buried in the small print, was that the broadband subscription and the maintenance bills land on the local council, so the free wifi is free only until the invoice arrives.
3. The roaming cap that lasted a fortnight
On 5 September the Commission unveiled its grand plan to end roaming charges, then quietly capped free roaming at ninety days a year. The backlash was so immediate that Juncker personally ordered the draft withdrawn within days and a press release on 21 September pretended it had never happened. A masterclass in announcing a rule, reading the room, and shredding it before the ink dried.
4. Link to the wrong page, lose in court
On 8 September the Court of Justice ruled in GS Media that posting a hyperlink to content published without the copyright holder's consent can itself be infringement, especially if you are doing it for profit and ought to have known. Europe thus appointed every commercial website as an unpaid copyright detective, obliged to investigate where its links lead before clicking publish.
5. Brussels bills Apple, Dublin says no thanks
Having declared on 30 August that Ireland must claw back up to 13 billion euros in tax from Apple, the Commission spent September watching the supposed beneficiary refuse the windfall. On 2 September the Irish government confirmed it would appeal, preferring sovereignty over its own tax affairs to a cheque it never asked Brussels to write. When the country owed the money turns the money down, the problem is the man holding the invoice.
6. Bratislava, where leaders reflected
On 16 September the twenty-seven met in Bratislava to diagnose the Union's condition without Britain in the room and produced a Declaration and a Roadmap, which is Brussels for a list of meetings. Having identified that voters felt the project was remote and unaccountable, the leaders resolved to schedule further summits in Malta and Rome to think about it some more.
7. The relocation scheme hits its targets, downwards
On 27 September the Commission reported on its flagship plan to relocate 160,000 asylum seekers across the Union and revealed that, halfway through, a grand total of 5,651 had actually been moved. Undeterred by a scheme running at roughly three per cent, the Council pressed on two days later, proving that the open-borders quota is unkillable precisely because it does not work.
8. A regulator with ambitions
Tucked inside the 14 September Connectivity Package was a plan to upgrade BEREC, the telecoms regulators' talking shop, into a fully fledged EU agency with legal personality and the power to set a single call termination rate for the whole continent. Another quiet transfer of authority from twenty-seven national regulators to one body in Brussels, dressed up as harmonisation.
9. A court for Canada, signed over your head
At the informal trade council in Bratislava on 22 and 23 September, ministers wrestled with CETA and its new Investment Court System, the EU-level tribunal designed to replace national arbitration. The plan was to apply most of the deal provisionally, before national parliaments had finished ratifying, on the theory that voters are an obstacle to be managed rather than consulted.
→ ciel.org
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