Eurobloat #0157 • May 2023
May was the month the Union discovered new and exciting ways to fine American companies, read your private messages, and grade its own homework. As ever, the only institution nobody is allowed to audit is the one writing the rules.
Folly of the Month: A record 1.2 billion euro fine, and a transatlantic mess of its own making
On 22 May the Irish Data Protection Commission, leaned on by the European Data Protection Board, fined Meta 1.2 billion euros and ordered it to stop sending European Facebook data to the United States. The supposed crime was relying on the very legal mechanism, standard contractual clauses, that Brussels itself had left as the only available option after its own Court of Justice struck down two successive data-transfer frameworks. So the Union built a legal cul-de-sac, watched a company drive into it because there was nowhere else to go, and then issued the largest GDPR penalty in history for doing so. A regulator fining people for obeying the rules it wrote is not enforcement, it is a protection racket with a press office.
→ dataprotection.ie → edpb.europa.eu
1. Brussels lawyers admit the chat-scanning plan is probably illegal
On 9 May leaked advice from the Council's own Legal Service warned that the Commission's plan to make every messaging app scan your private chats for illegal material would very probably be ruled "general and indiscriminate" monitoring, which is to say unlawful. When even the institution's in-house lawyers conclude that mass surveillance of half a billion people breaks the law, perhaps the answer is to stop, not to draft it more carefully.
2. Parliament committees vote to police artificial intelligence
On 11 May the Internal Market and Civil Liberties committees backed the draft AI Act, a sprawling rulebook to govern software the Union neither builds nor sells. Europe cannot produce a single search engine or social network of consequence, so it has settled instead on becoming the world's traffic warden for everyone else's inventions.
3. The Court invents a new way to sue over hurt feelings
On 4 May the Court of Justice ruled in the Austrian Post case that there is no minimum threshold of seriousness for compensation under the GDPR, so even trivial upset can found a claim. Brussels gave Europe a privacy law so expansive that being mildly annoyed by a database is now potentially a payday, and the lawyers are delighted.
4. The ECB keeps squeezing
On 4 May the European Central Bank raised its key rate to 3.25 percent, the seventh consecutive hike, after presiding over inflation it spent the previous year insisting was transitory. Households across the single currency now pay for the confident forecasts of people who will never face an election.
5. The grain pact that pleased nobody
On 2 May the Commission adopted measures letting Poland, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and Bulgaria restrict Ukrainian grain imports to mere transit, sweetened the next day with a 100 million euro payout to their farmers. Brussels first flooded these markets in the name of solidarity, then paid the affected farmers to be quiet, and called the whole improvised scramble a policy.
6. The accounts nobody is allowed to check, year thirteen
On 10 May Parliament again refused to sign off the Council's spending for 2021, because the Council simply will not submit to scrutiny, as it has declined to do every year since 2009. The Union lectures member states endlessly about transparency while one of its own arms keeps its books firmly shut.
7. The war on the word "eco"
On 11 May MEPs adopted their position on a directive to outlaw vague green claims such as "environmentally friendly", "natural" or "climate neutral" unless backed by approved evidence. A worthy aim, no doubt, but one that ends with Brussels deciding which adjectives a shampoo bottle is permitted to use.
8. Another 145 million for Moldova, conditions attached
On 9 May Parliament approved up to 145 million euros more in macro-financial assistance for Moldova, payable only once Chisinau meets political conditions on courts and corruption. The Union cannot resist turning a cheque into a report card, handing out money it borrows while grading the recipient on reforms it would never tolerate being graded on itself.
9. A rulebook for crypto, finalised
On 31 May the markets in crypto-assets regulation was signed into law, a single EU-wide regime stripping member states of the power to set their own rules for digital assets. Whatever one thinks of cryptocurrency, the pattern is familiar: a new technology appears, and Brussels' first instinct is to centralise authority over it before anyone has worked out what it is for.
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