Eurobloat #0099 • July 2018
July was a busy month for the people who know better than you. A record fine, a record trade deal, a record consultation, and a court ruling that a vacuum cleaner is too dangerous to be trusted with the truth.
Folly of the Month: The four-billion-euro shakedown
On 18 July the Commission fined Google 4.34 billion euros over Android, the largest competition penalty it had ever handed down, for the crime of giving away a mobile operating system for nothing and pre-installing its own apps on it. Margrethe Vestager declared that consumers had been denied choice, which will surprise the consumers who chose Android in their billions. No European firm builds a rival, so Brussels cannot conjure competition into existence. It can only invoice the company that succeeded.
→ wikipedia.org → france24.com
1. Parliament accidentally does the right thing on upload filters
On 5 July MEPs voted 318 to 278 to halt the Copyright Directive and its notorious Articles 11 and 13, the link tax and the mandatory upload filter that would have forced every platform to vet your memes before you posted them. The reprieve was temporary and the censorship machine was merely sent back for September, but for one glorious afternoon the Parliament declined to break the internet.
→ loc.gov
2. The Court rules that a gene is a GMO and a farmer is a suspect
On 25 July the Court of Justice decided that crops improved by modern gene editing such as CRISPR must crawl through the same decades-old approval maze as transgenic GMOs, while older techniques that scramble genes with chemicals and radiation get a free pass. Precision is regulated, brute force is exempt, and European plant science is invited to pack up and move to a continent that likes the future.
3. A travel permit for the borders Schengen abolished
On 5 July Parliament approved ETIAS, a new pre-travel authorisation scheme requiring visa-free visitors to register, pay and be screened before arrival. Sensible enough to want to know who is coming. Less sensible that it took a Union that spent thirty years tearing down internal frontiers to rediscover that an external one might be worth guarding, and that the answer is, naturally, another central database in Brussels.
4. The biggest trade deal ever, signed by people who keep telling you trade is bad
On 17 July the EU signed its Economic Partnership Agreement with Japan, the largest trade pact it had ever concluded, covering roughly a third of world output. Cheaper cheese and wine for Tokyo, fewer tariffs all round, and a useful reminder that free trade works beautifully, which makes one wonder why Brussels insists a country leaving its customs union can never have any.
5. Juncker goes to Washington and comes back with soybeans
On 25 July Jean-Claude Juncker met Donald Trump and emerged promising to work towards zero tariffs and to buy a great deal of American soya and liquefied gas. The steel and aluminium tariffs stayed exactly where they were, and so did the EU's retaliation, so the historic truce amounted to a handshake, a press conference and a standing order for beans.
6. Brussels appoints itself headmaster of the Polish courts
On 2 July the Commission opened an infringement procedure against Poland over its Supreme Court reforms, the latest move in a long campaign to grade a member state's judiciary and march it before the Court of Justice. Warsaw's reforms may well be objectionable, but the spectacle of unelected commissioners overruling a national parliament's law on its own courts is precisely the centralisation that sceptics keep being told is a fantasy.
7. Should we change the clocks? 4.6 million answers, zero action
On 4 July the Commission launched a public consultation on the twice-yearly clock change, which drew a record 4.6 million responses, 84 percent of them begging to stop. Over three million came from Germany alone. The Union discovered that its citizens hate something it does to them, congratulated itself on listening, and then changed precisely nothing for years.
8. A common defence fund, because the budget needed a new tin to put money in
On 3 July Parliament confirmed the European Defence Industrial Development Programme, a 500 million euro pot to part-fund joint weapons projects, much of it simply re-deployed from money the EU already had. The Council signed it off on 18 July. Defence is the business of nations and alliances, yet here is Brussels building a fresh budget line, a fresh acronym and a fresh claim on member states' soldiers.
9. The Court decides you cannot be told how the vacuum-cleaner label was tested
On 25 July the Court of Justice ruled in the Dyson case that a manufacturer need not, indeed may not, tell consumers that the EU's energy rating for vacuum cleaners is measured on empty bags, even though real bags fill up and guzzle power. The label must be believed, the testing conditions must be hidden, and the citizen must be protected from the inconvenient truth printed on the box.
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