Eurobloat #0106 • February 2019
February brought the usual harvest. A negotiated machine to filter everything you upload, a blacklist quietly gutted to keep a friendly monarch happy, and a Parliament that paused between votes to demand more power for itself.
Folly of the Month: The internet gets a filter, and you pay for it
On 13 February the negotiators of Parliament, Council and Commission shook hands on the Copyright Directive, complete with Article 17, the rule that effectively requires online platforms to scan and filter everything users upload before it appears. The text was sold as protecting creators, which is the polite way of saying every photo, meme and home video must now pass through an automated censor that no human voted for. Smaller platforms cannot afford the machinery, so the practical effect is to entrench the very giants the EU claims to be reining in. Brussels spent two years arguing about it, then declared victory over the open internet.
→ eff.org
1. Saudi Arabia too dirty to list, then too useful to list
On 13 February the Commission published a blacklist of 23 countries with weak controls on money laundering and terrorist financing, including Saudi Arabia. By the end of the month, after King Salman wrote to EU leaders and Riyadh hinted at lost contracts, member states were lining up to throw the whole list out. Nothing says principled financial integrity like deleting the awkward name the moment a cheque is mentioned.
2. A fish deal in someone else's sea
On 12 February the Parliament approved, by 415 votes to 189, a fisheries partnership with Morocco that extends EU boats into the waters of occupied Western Sahara, worth some 208.7 million euro. MEPs first voted down a proposal to ask the EU's own Court whether this was even legal, having apparently decided that the answer might be inconvenient. The Court had already raised concerns; Brussels fished on regardless.
3. Brussels blocks Europe's own train champion
On 6 February the Commission vetoed the merger of France's Alstom and Germany's Siemens, a rail deal backed by both Paris and Berlin to compete against China's state giant. Margrethe Vestager explained that two national governments and their flagship firms simply did not understand competition as well as her department did. The schoolmaster marked the homework, and the pupils were two of the largest economies on earth.
4. Parliament debates the future of Europe, concludes it needs more Parliament
On 13 February MEPs adopted a resolution on the state of the debate on the future of Europe, following a session with Italy's Giuseppe Conte. The agreed conclusion, predictably, was that the cure for public detachment from Brussels is a Brussels with yet more powers, including the right for Parliament to initiate legislation. A body worried that voters feel ignored proposed, as its remedy, to give itself more to do.
5. A new screen for foreign money, run from the centre
On 14 February the Parliament adopted the framework for screening foreign direct investment into the EU. Sold as a shield against unwanted takeovers, it also hands the Commission a coordinating role over decisions that used to belong squarely to national capitals. Another competence quietly migrates to Brussels under the comforting banner of security.
6. The ePrivacy rewrite stalls again, mercifully
Throughout February the Romanian presidency floated draft after draft of the ePrivacy Regulation, the proposed law that would reach deep into how communications and tracking are handled. By month's end the working group could not agree, and the file kept slipping off the agenda. The one small blessing of the year so far is a Brussels too divided to finish a surveillance rulebook.
7. Rule-of-law lectures, with the volume turned down
At the General Affairs Council on 19 February the Commission presented its analysis of the Article 7 cases against Poland and Hungary, and the Council promptly did nothing. Rule of law was not even discussed at the first Council of the year, the procedure drifting toward the Finnish presidency unresolved. The EU loves grading member states on their values, right up until grading might require an actual decision.
8. Telling banks what they may charge
On 14 February MEPs voted, 532 to 22, to force banks outside the euro area to charge the same for cross-border euro payments as for domestic ones. The pitch is a saving of more than a billion euro a year for consumers, which sounds generous until you remember the EU is again setting prices across a continent by decree. Cheaper fees are welcome; a Brussels that fixes them by law is the part worth noticing.
9. The Court keeps a German tax weapon aimed at third countries
On 26 February the Court of Justice ruled in case C-135/17 that the free movement of capital does not stop a member state taxing a resident on income earned by a company in a third country. A rare February ruling that left national tax authorities holding the bigger stick, and a reminder that the EU's free-movement gospel bends neatly whenever revenue is involved.
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