Eurobloat #0132 • April 2021
April was the month the EU decided that the answer to a continent recovering from a pandemic was to regulate artificial intelligence, charge Apple, invent a travel pass, and dream up a new tax. The President of the Commission, meanwhile, was left standing.
Folly of the Month: The Commission writes the rulebook for machines it cannot yet build
On 21 April the Commission unveiled the Artificial Intelligence Act, a sweeping proposal to classify, license and police every piece of software clever enough to be called a model. Brussels had not waited for a European AI industry to exist before deciding how to fine it, with penalties of up to 6 per cent of worldwide turnover written in before the technology had matured. The pitch was that Europe would set the global standard for trustworthy AI, the same global standard it once promised for cookie banners, which now appear on every website on Earth and protect nobody. The actual rules ran to dozens of pages of risk tiers and conformity assessments, which is to say a full employment scheme for compliance lawyers, drafted by the only major economy that has not produced a single large AI company of note.
1. Apple gets a charge sheet for letting Spotify have it cheaper
On 30 April the Commission sent Apple a Statement of Objections, declaring after a complaint by Spotify that the App Store distorts competition in music streaming. Margrethe Vestager announced that Apple has a monopoly, which is a striking way to describe a market in which Spotify is the largest player, and the remedy on offer is for Brussels to decide how a private firm prices a shop it built.
2. A pass to move within your own continent
On 29 April the Parliament adopted its position on the Digital Green Certificate, a QR code proving you have been jabbed, tested or recovered before you may cross a border. A union founded on free movement had landed, within a single year, on a scheme where citizens must produce papers and a unique identifier to board a train, and Europe's own data protection supervisors had already warned about the discrimination and data risks baked in.
3. Parliament wants a tax it can call its own
On 29 April MEPs adopted a resolution on digital taxation, pressing for a European digital levy regardless of the parallel talks at the OECD, and eyeing it as a new own resource to fund the Union directly. The pattern is familiar: a tax invented in Brussels, collected from companies, then routed past national treasuries into the EU budget, so that the Commission need never again pass the begging bowl to member states.
4. Two Presidents, one chair
On 6 April, on a visit to Ankara, Commission President von der Leyen found that protocol had laid out a chair for Charles Michel and a sofa for her, while Erdogan and Michel took the seats. The episode, christened Sofagate, achieved the rare feat of making the EU's two Presidents look both petty and powerless in a single photograph, during a charm offensive aimed at a regime the Union pays to hold back migrants.
5. The Commission sues its own vaccine supplier
On 28 April the Commission's lawsuit against AstraZeneca opened in a Brussels court over delivery shortfalls, the climax of a procurement saga the Commission had run on behalf of all 27 states. Having insisted that centralised buying would be cheaper and fairer than letting nations fend for themselves, Brussels ended up in court suing the firm it had chosen, while a recently departed member state vaccinated faster.
6. Net zero becomes the law of laws
On 21 April negotiators for the Parliament and Council struck a provisional deal on the European Climate Law, making a 55 per cent emissions cut by 2030 and climate neutrality by 2050 legally binding and, in the Commission's word, irreversible. Twenty-seven elected parliaments will now spend the next three decades implementing a target their successors are forbidden to revisit, agreed after fourteen hours of overnight haggling in Brussels.
7. A green rulebook that dared not name gas or nuclear
On 21 April the Commission also published its Taxonomy Climate Delegated Act, the official list of which investments count as sustainable, while quietly leaving out fossil gas and nuclear power for a later fight. A scheme meant to end greenwashing began by ducking the two most contested questions in European energy, postponing them to a complementary act, because nothing says decisive leadership like a rulebook with the hard parts removed.
8. Border agency spots the boats, then looks away
In April a joint investigation by Der Spiegel, ARD, Lighthouse Reports and Liberation reported that Frontex aircraft had repeatedly located migrant boats and that the Libyan coast guard then towed the people back to Libya. The Union that lectures the world on human rights was found running aerial surveillance whose practical effect was to help a militia haul the vulnerable back to detention, all so the boats never reach a European port.
9. Parliament refuses to sign off the Council's accounts
In its April plenary the Parliament granted discharge for the 2019 budget to the Commission and most institutions, but withheld it from the Council for refusing to cooperate, and delayed Frontex over questions about its management. The body that demands transparency from every member state cannot get its own Council to open its books, and one of its star agencies could not be signed off either.
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