Eurobloat #0085 • May 2017
May 2017 was the month the Commission stopped pretending it wanted less Europe. It published a wish list for a euro treasury, fined a tech firm for updating an app, and then handed every member state a school report.
Folly of the Month: A finance minister nobody elected, with taxes nobody voted for
On 31 May the Commission published its reflection paper on deepening Economic and Monetary Union, which is Brussels for "give us more". The shopping list included a European Minister for Economics and Finance, fresh "resources at the EU level" meaning European taxes and tax harmonisation, a European Monetary Fund, Eurobonds and a euro-area treasury with its own budget by 2025. None of these things fixed the design faults that nearly sank the single currency. They simply moved the begging bowl and the tax-raising powers up one floor, to a level where no national parliament can say no.
1. Facebook fined 110 million euros for changing its mind
On 18 May the Commission fined Facebook 110 million euros for giving misleading information during the 2014 WhatsApp merger review, because it later managed to match accounts it had said it could not match. The merger clearance stayed in force, the deal was never in doubt, and the punishment was for the paperwork. Brussels could not stop the takeover, so it billed the firm for its homework instead.
→ cnbc.com
2. The court that accidentally remembered member states exist
On 16 May the Court of Justice issued Opinion 2/15 and ruled that the EU-Singapore trade deal could not be signed by Brussels alone, because parts of it, including investor-state dispute settlement, needed every national parliament to agree. For once a treaty could not be imposed over the heads of the capitals. The Commission treated this rare outbreak of consent as an inconvenience to be engineered around in future deals.
3. Upload filters dressed up as copyright
By May the Commission's copyright proposal had curdled, and campaigners from Mozilla to Wikimedia wrote to MEPs warning that Article 13 would force internet platforms to run automatic filters scanning everything users tried to upload. A scheme sold as paying artists turned out to be a machine that inspects your posts before you make them. Brussels rarely meets a private message it does not want to read.
→ eff.org
4. Twenty-seven governments handed a school report
On 22 May the Commission issued its country-specific recommendations, telling each member state which reforms to carry out and which budgets to cut over the coming year. The body that cannot balance its own accounts spent the month grading the people who pay for it. Sovereignty now means doing as you are told, then thanking the schoolmaster.
5. A rulebook for money market funds, because there were not enough
On 16 May the Council adopted the Money Market Funds Regulation, a fresh layer of EU rules for a corner of finance that had managed for decades without one. The text runs to dozens of articles of stress tests, buffers and reporting. It is the sort of burden Brussels will, in a few years, proudly propose to "simplify".
6. Hungary told it may not choose its own universities
On 25 May Hungary formally rejected the Commission's complaint over its higher education law, the latest round in Brussels deciding which universities a member state may license on its own soil. Whatever one thinks of the law, the principle is plain: education is a national matter until the Commission decides it is not. The remedy, as ever, was a lawsuit aimed at the capital rather than a conversation with it.
→ globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu
7. The spring forecast: confident, precise and wrong
On 11 May the Commission published its Spring 2017 forecast, predicting euro-area growth to the decimal point through 2018. The institution that did not see the last crisis coming carried on issuing its annual horoscope with a straight face. A forecast nobody can be sacked for missing is not a forecast, it is a press release.
→ economy-finance.ec.europa.eu
8. Consumer law declared fit, then handed a bigger stick anyway
In late May the Commission published the results of its REFIT fitness check of EU consumer and marketing law, which found the existing thicket of directives broadly fit for purpose and then called for tougher enforcement and more dissuasive penalties all the same. The cure for too many rules was, naturally, harder punishment for breaking them. Within a year this groundwork produced the New Deal for Consumers and its harmonised four per cent of turnover fines, the bigger stick the fitness check had been sharpening.
9. Roaming abolished, three years after Brussels could have
After years of summits, caps and self-congratulation, the wholesale roaming deal was sealed so that "roam like at home" could begin on 15 June. Brussels spent the spring taking a victory lap for ending a charge it had spent a decade slowly legislating away. The achievement was abolishing a problem it had been managing rather than solving.
→ digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu
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