Eurobloat #0153 • January 2023
A new year, a new currency for Croatia, a fresh corruption scandal still smouldering in the corridors, and a Commission President who flew to a Swiss ski resort to announce that the cure for too much government was more of it. January 2023 had it all.
Folly of the Month: Meta fined €390 million for the crime of reading its own contract
On 4 January the Irish Data Protection Commission, prodded along by the European Data Protection Board, fined Meta €390 million and declared that Facebook and Instagram may no longer rely on a contract to serve targeted advertising. The reasoning is a marvel of Brussels logic. You agree to the terms, the terms say the service is paid for with personalised ads, and the regulator decides this arrangement is illegal because you were not asked a second time. Meta was given three months to invent a fresh consent button, the lawyers were given years of billable work, and the user was given precisely nothing he did not already have. This is what the GDPR was always for: not protecting anyone, but generating press releases.
1. Croatia hands Brussels its currency and its border posts
On 1 January Croatia became the twentieth member of the euro area and the latest entrant to the Schengen zone, surrendering its money and its border controls on the same morning. The fireworks were genuine, the celebration was loud, and the lesson that the euro area has spent two decades demonstrating, that one interest rate cannot fit twenty economies, was politely ignored. More Europe, less Croatia.
2. Von der Leyen flies to Davos to declare a subsidy war
On 17 January, from the World Economic Forum, the Commission President answered America's wasteful Inflation Reduction Act with a wasteful plan of her own, promising to relax state-aid rules and build a European Sovereignty Fund to shower clean tech with public money. The proposed remedy for distortive foreign subsidies was, in short, more subsidies. Nothing says home of innovation quite like a bidding war fought with the taxpayer's wallet.
3. Qatargate, and a Parliament that investigated itself and found nothing wrong
The cash-for-influence scandal rolled into January with Belgian prosecutors asking on 2 January to strip two more MEPs of their immunity, having already seized roughly 1.5 million euros in cash. Human Rights Watch warned on 18 January that the Parliament's headline reform, a proposed 500-word cap on urgency resolutions, was the wrong cure for the wrong disease, more likely to blunt its human rights work than to deter corruption. The institution that lectures the world on integrity discovered that policing its own members is a great deal harder than fining a phone app.
→ hrw.org
4. A brand new layer of red tape arrives, on schedule
On 12 January the Foreign Subsidies Regulation entered into force, gifting Europe a fresh notification regime in which mergers and public contracts above certain thresholds must now be cleared by Brussels for the sin of having received money from outside the bloc. A new form, a new deadline, a new team of officials, and a new reason for lawyers to charge by the hour. The single market turned thirty by adding to the paperwork.
→ competition-policy.ec.europa.eu
5. The Court discovers that companies must name every recipient of your data
On 12 January the Court of Justice ruled in Case C-154/21 that, on request, a company must tell you the specific recipients of your personal data, not merely the vague categories. It sounds reasonable until you imagine every firm in Europe now compiling and defending exhaustive lists for anyone who asks, with the courts standing by to settle the inevitable disputes. Another judgment, another compliance department.
6. Thirty years of the single market, celebrated by the people who run it
On 16 January the Parliament threw a ceremony to mark thirty years of the single market, and on 18 January it adopted a resolution congratulating the project and itself. The single market is a genuinely good idea, which is precisely why it needed no help from a self-administered anniversary resolution. Nothing burnishes an achievement like the bureaucracy that runs it voting to applaud the bureaucracy that runs it.
7. Parliament votes to chase shell companies, and to widen the net while it is at it
On 17 January MEPs adopted their position on the UNSHELL directive by 637 votes to 2, then promptly amended it to lower the thresholds so that more companies fall inside the new reporting regime. A measure sold as targeting empty letterbox firms ends up demanding paperwork from a far larger field of real ones. The direction of travel in Brussels is always the same: catch the guilty by burdening everyone.
→ icij.org
8. The plan to police where the rest of the world sends its rubbish
On 17 January the Parliament set its negotiating position on the revised waste shipments regulation, proposing to ban hazardous waste exports to non-OECD countries and to make everyone else prove they can treat the rest sustainably. Quite how Brussels intends to audit the recycling habits of countries that are not in the EU was left, as ever, for a later regulation and a larger agency.
9. The Commission admits only one in five deportation orders is ever enforced
In a letter to the twenty-seven dated 26 January, sent ahead of the special European Council on migration, the Commission President conceded that only around 20 per cent of third-country nationals ordered to leave the EU actually go, and proposed yet more partnerships and processes to fix it. The system that prides itself on open doors has discovered it cannot work the locks. Years of grand declarations on migration, and the headline number is that four in five removal orders are simply ignored.
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