Eurobloat #0108 • April 2019
April was a busy month for the people who govern you without ever once asking. They gave themselves filters for your uploads, a corps for your borders, a single map of your fingerprints and a set of guidelines telling robots to be nicer than the institution that wrote them.
Folly of the Month: The upload filter is finally law
On 15 April the Council gave its final blessing to the Copyright Directive, the one whose Article 17 quietly conscripts every large platform into policing what you post before you post it. After a March vote so close that several MEPs admitted afterwards they had pressed the wrong button, the great machinery of Brussels ground on regardless. The official line is that this rescues struggling artists from American technology giants. The practical effect is that the same American technology giants are now the only firms rich enough to build the filters, and everyone else may apply for permission to exist.
1. Brexit postponed again, because the deadline was the only thing working
At a special summit on 10 April the EU27 graciously extended Article 50 to 31 October, on the strict condition that Britain hold European elections it had voted to escape. A union that cannot let a member leave on the date the member chose is not a club, it is a subscription you cannot cancel.
2. A 10,000-strong border army to guard the border it lost
On 17 April Parliament voted, 403 to 162, to give Frontex a standing corps of 10,000 by 2027. Having spent years insisting that external borders were a quaint national hang-up, Brussels has now discovered borders, and will spend a fortune staffing the ones it spent the previous decade leaving open.
3. One hour to take it down, or else
Parliament's first reading on 17 April backed the terrorist content regulation and its one-hour removal rule, whereby any platform must delete flagged material within sixty minutes of an official order. MEPs at least stripped out the mandatory upload filters, which is faint comfort given they had just mandated upload filters for copyright two days earlier.
4. Everybody's biometric databases, helpfully joined up
In April Parliament signed off the interoperability regulations stitching the EU's separate police, border and migration databases into one searchable whole, complete with a multiple-identity detector and a central store of faces and fingerprints. Nothing says freedom, security and justice quite like a single portal through which the state can look up everyone at once.
5. Brussels writes ethics for machines
On 8 April the Commission's hand-picked expert group published Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI, seven requirements demanding that algorithms be lawful, fair and transparent. One waits, still, for the version that demands the same of the Commission.
→ digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu
6. A new permanent agency you will be paying for forever
The Cybersecurity Act of 17 April turned ENISA from a temporary outfit into a permanent EU agency with a permanent budget and a shiny new certification scheme. In Brussels nothing dies, it merely receives a fresh mandate and a bigger office.
7. Telling you what your next car may emit
On 15 April the Council signed off CO2 standards requiring new cars to cut emissions 37.5 per cent by 2030 and vans by 31 per cent. The men who once measured the wattage of your vacuum cleaner have graduated to measuring the breath of your engine.
8. A directive to tell members how to run their workplaces
On 16 April Parliament adopted the Whistleblower Directive, imposing a single EU-wide template that every national legal system must now bend to accommodate. Twenty-seven legal traditions, one Brussels blueprint, and the usual pretence that this is merely a minimum standard.
9. Now Brussels manages your parental leave too
Parliament fixed its position on the Work-Life Balance Directive on 4 April, dictating from the centre how much leave fathers, mothers and carers across the continent shall take. Family life, it turns out, was simply another competence waiting to be harmonised.
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