Eurobloat #0105 • January 2019
A new year, a fresh chance for the Union to confuse a press release with an achievement. January gave us a twenty-first-birthday party for the euro, a fine for daring to read a privacy notice the wrong way, and a presidency held by the very country the Commission cannot stop investigating.
Folly of the Month: The GDPR opens its account by fining Google fifty million
On 21 January the French regulator CNIL handed Google a fifty million euro penalty, the first headline fine under the EU's shiny new data-protection regime. The grand charge was that Google's consent screens and privacy notices were spread across too many pages and were not transparent enough, which is a remarkable accusation from an institution whose own rulebook runs to ninety-nine articles and a hundred and seventy-three recitals. The genius of the General Data Protection Regulation was always that the burden falls on whoever can be reached: in practice a single national watchdog, acting on complaints filed within hours of the law taking effect, can reach across a continent and reach into the pocket of a foreign company. Brussels built a machine for punishing the act of explaining things, and then complained the explanations were too long.
1. Mastercard fined 570 million for letting shops shop around
On 22 January the Commission fined Mastercard 570 million euros because its rules stopped retailers seeking cheaper card-processing deals in other member states. So the single market is sacred when the EU wants a fine, and conveniently forgotten the rest of the year when a national champion needs protecting. The cheque, naturally, goes to Brussels rather than to a single overcharged shopkeeper.
2. The upload-filter machine stalls when members rebel
On 19 January Romania cancelled the planned copyright trilogue after eleven governments, including Germany, Italy, Poland and the Netherlands, refused to swallow the Article 13 compromise that would oblige platforms to filter everything users upload. For one happy moment the centralising censorship engine seized up because national capitals said no. The lesson Brussels drew was not that the idea was bad, but that the wording needed another go.
→ eff.org
3. The rule-of-law schoolmaster hands the keys to its problem pupil
On 1 January Romania took over the rotating presidency of the Council, the same Romania that the Commission had just savaged in its most critical rule-of-law report to date, whose own leaders faced corruption proceedings, and whose presidency began amid street protests. The Union that lectures Warsaw and Budapest on judicial independence put the gavel in the hands of a government it was actively investigating. Consistency, like sovereignty, is for the smaller members.
4. The euro turns twenty and throws itself a party
The single currency celebrated its twentieth birthday on 1 January, an occasion the institutions marked with speeches, anniversary branding and a great deal of self-congratulation. Twenty years on, the unmentioned guests were the bailouts, the youth unemployment in the south, and the one-size-fits-nobody interest rate set in Frankfurt. A currency that cannot devalue celebrates by reminding the periphery it never can.
5. A Europe-wide tax on tech revenues, hunted across the continent
Through January, Paris and Berlin pushed a narrowed EU digital services tax on advertising revenue, hoping to manufacture the unanimity that had eluded them in December. An EU-level tax is the holy grail of the centralisers: revenue raised in the name of fairness, levied above the heads of national parliaments. By March the scheme collapsed again because tax is one of the few areas where members still hold a veto, which tells you exactly why Brussels wants the veto gone.
6. Parliament confirms the EU can be left, then debates Brexit anyway
Following the Court's December ruling in Wightman that a member state may revoke its Article 50 notice unilaterally, the January plenary returned once more to the United Kingdom's withdrawal. The judges helpfully clarified that you may always change your mind and stay, which is the Union's preferred ending to every departure story. Brexit remained the one experiment the EU cannot bear to see succeed, because a country thriving outside the project is the only argument it cannot answer.
7. The great plastic-straw emergency is confirmed
On 18 January member states' ambassadors confirmed the provisional deal banning a list of single-use plastic items across the Union, the directive that would outlaw straws, cutlery and cotton-bud sticks by continental decree. A bloc that cannot agree a budget or a migration policy moved with unusual speed to legislate the shape of a coffee stirrer. Nothing concentrates Brussels like a problem small enough to ban.
8. An eight-day ultimatum, and a common foreign policy that is not common
On 26 January the EU's foreign-policy chief Federica Mogherini warned Venezuela's Maduro to call elections or face unspecified further action, while Spain, France, Germany and Britain issued their own eight-day ultimatums on recognising the opposition. Twenty-eight foreign policies wearing one badge is not a single voice, it is a chorus that cannot agree which note to sing. The "further action" was, as ever, left helpfully undefined.
9. Article 7 grinds on, grading members it will never sanction
Through January the Article 7 proceedings against Poland and Hungary continued to go nowhere, the Council paralysed in part by its discomfort over the rule-of-law questions hanging over the Romanian presidency itself. The procedure exists to discipline wayward members, yet requires a near-unanimity that guarantees it never bites. So Brussels keeps the threat in the drawer, useful for sermons, useless for results, and aimed only ever downward.
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