Eurobloat #0159 • July 2023
Spain took the wheel of the Council, the biggest names in technology lined up to be measured for the gatekeeper collar, and the Union spent July paying other people to do the border control it cannot manage itself. A productive month, by its own standards.
Folly of the Month: The third time Brussels promised your data is safe in America
On 10 July the Commission adopted its adequacy decision for the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, declaring that personal data may once again flow freely across the Atlantic. This is the third such framework. Safe Harbour was struck down by the Court of Justice, Privacy Shield was struck down by the same Court, and after eighteen months of negotiation Brussels has produced a near-identical successor that the activist Max Schrems promised to challenge before the ink was dry. Rather than let member states sort out their own data arrangements, the Commission centralises the decision, gets it overturned in Luxembourg, and starts again, and we are all expected to applaud the diligence.
1. Seven of the largest firms on earth fitted for the gatekeeper collar
By the deadline of 3 July, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, Microsoft and Samsung had all notified the Commission that they crossed the thresholds of the Digital Markets Act, and on 4 July Brussels confirmed the haul. Rather than let markets and competition law sort out who dominates what, the Union invents a special category of company, summons the seven biggest names to report themselves, and prepares to dictate how each of them may run its own products. The collar is bespoke and the wearers were made to bring their own measurements.
→ digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu
2. Brussels pays Tunisia to guard the borders it cannot guard
On 16 July the Commission signed a memorandum with Tunisia promising 105 million euros for border control plus another 150 million in budget support, with up to 900 million more dangled on top. Having failed for years to control its own external frontier, the Union now outsources the job to President Kais Saied, a man busy dismantling his own democracy. The cheque is the policy.
3. A summit so important it could not mention Russia
The EU-CELAC summit on 17 and 18 July, the first in eight years, produced a final declaration watered down so thoroughly that it never once named Russia as the aggressor in Ukraine, and even then Nicaragua refused to sign the paragraph. Latin American leaders had already vetoed any appearance by President Zelensky. Two days of motorcades and group photographs to agree on almost nothing.
4. The Nature Restoration Law survives by twenty-two votes, then carries on regardless
On 12 July the Parliament rejected a motion to bin the Nature Restoration Law and adopted its position by 336 to 300. A legally binding obligation on every member state to restore its ecosystems, opposed by nearly half the chamber, squeaks through on a knife-edge and is then treated as settled European will. A blueprint approved by margins this narrow would, in any sensible parliament, be sent back for a rethink.
5. The Court rules that competition regulators may now also police your data
On 4 July the Court of Justice held, in the Meta case, that a national competition authority may rule on breaches of the GDPR while investigating an abuse of dominance. So a privacy law already enforced by data-protection regulators may now be wielded a second time by competition regulators, doubling the number of bodies that may fine the same company for the same conduct. The lawyers call it clarification.
6. A whole regulation about how you change a battery
Regulation 2023/1542 on batteries was adopted by the co-legislators on 12 July, decreeing among much else that portable batteries in appliances must be designed so that consumers can remove and replace them. A noble aim, no doubt, but it took the European Union an entire regulation, years of negotiation and ninety-odd pages of the Official Journal to instruct the continent on the correct way to open the back of a gadget.
7. New cross-border orders to hand over your data, courtesy of the e-evidence package
Published on 28 July, Regulation 2023/1543 lets a prosecutor in one member state order a service provider established in another to produce or preserve your electronic evidence, wherever the data physically sits. Marketed as efficient cross-border justice, it is in practice a standing instrument by which one country's authorities reach across borders into your inbox, with the provider, not a judge in your own country, as the gatekeeper.
8. The Chips Act: forty-three billion euros to subsidise our way to strategic autonomy
On 11 July the Parliament approved the final text of the European Chips Act, the Union's plan to throw public money at semiconductor factories and, if a shortage strikes, to seize emergency powers over the chip market. Brussels noticed it had fallen behind in chips and concluded, as ever, that the answer was a centrally directed subsidy race and a new crisis toolbox rather than letting member states and firms get on with it.
9. The Commission opens a deep probe into the threat posed by robot vacuum cleaners
On 6 July the Commission launched an in-depth investigation into Amazon's purchase of iRobot, gravely concerned that control of a maker of robot hoovers might distort the market for robot hoovers. Brussels found the time and the manpower to spend months scrutinising who gets to sell a self-driving dustpan, while the genuinely strategic questions of the month went begging.
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