Eurobloat #0081 • January 2017
A fresh year, a fresh presidency, and the same old instinct. While Britain prepared to leave, the institutions spent January proposing to scan everyone's messages, mint a new bureaucratic card, and remind member states who is really in charge of their statute books.
Folly of the Month: The ePrivacy Regulation, or how to read your messages for your own good
On 10 January the Commission unveiled the ePrivacy Regulation, a proposal to extend the old cookie rules to WhatsApp, Skype and Facebook Messenger, all in the name of protecting the confidentiality of your communications. The trick, as ever, is that a measure dressed up as a shield for privacy hands Brussels the authority to set the terms on which private messages are handled across the continent. Nobody asked for a pan-European regulator of the chat on your phone, and yet here it was, lovingly drafted, branded as a fundamental right, and ready to outlive several governments in negotiation. The confidentiality of your conversation is apparently far too important to be left to you.
1. Ask Brussels before you legislate
The same day, the Commission proposed a new Services Notification Procedure obliging member states to notify draft rules on services to Brussels before adopting them, so adjustments can still be made. A national parliament that must clear its own laws with the Commission before they pass is not a sovereign parliament, it is a branch office awaiting sign-off.
2. The plastic card that frees the plumber
The 10 January services package also gifted the continent a European services e-card, a document a builder or business adviser would apply for in order to work in another member state. The single market was supposedly built to let people trade freely, and twenty-five years on the answer to remaining friction is, naturally, another card and another office to issue it.
3. Let us show our European pride
On 31 January, ahead of the Malta summit, Donald Tusk wrote to twenty-seven leaders urging them to stand up for the dignity of a united Europe and to show European pride. The remedy for a Union shaken by a departing Britain and an anxious public was, predictably, more sermons about Europe rather than fewer demands from it.
4. Four rounds to find a President
On 17 January the Parliament took an entire day and four rounds of voting before electing Antonio Tajani its President with 351 votes to 282. A chamber that struggles to choose its own chairman without a marathon ballot nonetheless feels qualified to draft the rules for half a billion people.
5. The court that overrules the national court
On 26 January the Court of Justice ruled in Banco Primus that a Spanish court, having once approved a mortgage contract, must reopen it to hunt for unfair terms, brushing aside the national principle of res judicata. Luxembourg has decided that when a member state's own courts reach a final decision, that decision is final only until Brussels says otherwise.
6. Due diligence for everyone else
On 24 January the Parliament's trade committee approved the final text of the Conflict Minerals Regulation, turning a voluntary scheme into a mandatory supply-chain due-diligence burden for importers of tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold. A worthy aim, certainly, achieved as Brussels prefers, by piling the paperwork on companies and calling the result responsibility.
7. A register for robots
On 12 January the legal affairs committee called for EU-wide rules on robotics, complete with a register of advanced robots and a brand new EU Agency for Robotics and Artificial Intelligence. Faced with a technology barely out of the laboratory, the reflex was instant, draw up a register and staff an agency before anyone has worked out what the problem is.
8. Building a data economy from the top down
Also on 10 January the Commission published its Building a European Data Economy communication, fretting about who owns machine-generated data and floating new EU rules on data ownership and access. A market that was busily generating data on its own apparently could not be trusted to do so without Brussels first deciding who is allowed to hold it.
9. Malta takes the wheel, migration still adrift
On 1 January Malta assumed the rotating presidency, naming migration its first priority just as the Central Mediterranean route stayed wide open. The Union's answer, sketched out that month and signed in Malta weeks later, was to pay and train the Libyan coast guard, an arrangement that swapped open-border failure for a grubby deal with a country in chaos.
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