Eurobloat #0163 • November 2023
November was a busy month for the people who govern us without ever appearing on a ballot we recognise. They signed off on a law to weaken the locks on the entire web, voted to take away the vetoes that protect the nations they claim to serve, and quietly switched on the machinery for a digital currency. All in a day's work for the continent that cannot agree on the shape of a banana.
Folly of the Month: Brussels decides your browser should trust whoever a government tells it to
On 8 November the institutions settled the eIDAS 2.0 framework, including the now infamous Article 45, which orders web browsers to trust digital certificates issued by authorities that EU member states designate, and forbids the browser makers from distrusting those certificates even if they spot the certificate being used to intercept your traffic. Around 400 cybersecurity experts, along with Mozilla, signed an open letter warning that this hands every member government a master key to snoop on encrypted connections, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation said it would drag the web back to 2011, when certificate authorities and governments could read your secrets together. Brussels, which never tires of lecturing the world about its values, has produced a law that would make a surveillance state blush. It is being sold, naturally, as a convenience.
1. Parliament votes to abolish the vetoes that protect its members
On 22 November the European Parliament adopted a report, by 291 votes to 274, proposing to amend the treaties so that national governments can no longer block decisions by unanimity across swathes of policy. The chamber that exists because of the nations now wants the nations stripped of their last defence against being outvoted. They call it ending paralysis. The rest of us call it removing the brakes.
2. The Data Act arrives to tell you who really owns your toaster
On 27 November the Council gave final approval to the Data Act, a regulation governing the data generated by everything from smart home appliances to industrial machinery. Brussels has decided that the proper response to the internet of things is several hundred pages of harmonised rules about who may copy what from your dishwasher. Somewhere a lawyer is being enriched, and somewhere a manufacturer is reading the small print instead of building anything.
3. The AI Act nearly collapses because three governments noticed it would strangle their own industry
In mid November France, Germany and Italy staged a revolt in the AI Act talks, demanding that powerful foundation models face a voluntary code of conduct rather than binding obligations and fines. Their own champions, Mistral and Aleph Alpha, had pointed out that the rules Brussels was drafting would hand the future to American and Chinese rivals. It took the prospect of regulating their national pride out of existence for the three biggest members to discover the costs of EU overreach. Better late than never.
4. MEPs spend the month dismantling their own plan to scan your private messages
On 14 November the Parliament's civil liberties committee voted to strip out the indiscriminate scanning of everyone's chats from the so called Chat Control regulation and to protect encryption, a position confirmed by the plenary on 22 November. We should be grateful, except that it was the Commission that proposed reading every citizen's messages in the first place, having been told by its own experts that the technology does not work without flooding the world in false accusations. The fire brigade wants applause for not finishing the arson.
→ edri.org
5. Brussels passes a law to regulate the methane of countries that are not in the EU
On 15 November the Council and Parliament agreed the first EU methane regulation, which by 2030 will impose maximum methane intensity values on the oil, gas and coal that foreign producers sell into Europe. Unable to keep its own house in order, the EU has decided the cleanest path to climate virtue is to write rules for sovereign exporters on other continents. The extraterritorial schoolmaster strikes again, red pen in hand.
6. The Nature Restoration Law tells farmers in every member state what to do with their fields
Late on 9 November the institutions reached a deal on the Nature Restoration Law, obliging every member state to restore at least 20 per cent of its land and sea by 2030, replant three billion trees and return 25,000 kilometres of rivers to their natural course. Whether a meadow in Bavaria or a bog in Ireland is restored is now a matter settled in Brussels. The Council could not even muster a majority to adopt it cleanly, which tells you how welcome the instruction was.
7. The 2024 budget swells to a figure no taxpayer was asked about
During the second November plenary the Parliament adopted the 2024 EU budget, with 189.4 billion euros in commitments and 142.6 billion in payments. The numbers grow, the gravy train lengthens, and the audit reports keep finding billions of euros paid out in error. Nobody resigns, and nobody is held to account, because accountability is the one thing the budget never funds.
8. The European Central Bank starts building a currency that can watch you spend it
On 1 November the ECB began the two year preparation phase of the digital euro, drafting rulebooks and lining up providers for the infrastructure of a central bank currency for every wallet. We are assured this is not a decision to issue one, merely the construction of everything required to issue one. A programmable euro, controlled from Frankfurt, is precisely the kind of centralising convenience that should make anyone who values cash reach for their banknotes.
9. Brussels lines up fresh migration deals while the last one dumps people in the desert
In mid November, with criticism of its July memorandum with Tunisia still ringing in its ears, the Commission was busy preparing new anti smuggling partnerships with Tunisia and Egypt before the year was out. Departures had fallen, but only because Tunisian authorities had expelled thousands of sub-Saharan migrants from Sfax and driven them to the Libyan and Algerian borders, which the EU then dressed up as progress. Brussels pays unsavoury regimes to guard the borders it cannot guard itself, calls the brutality strategic partnership, and reaches for the chequebook again. The borders the EU promised to manage remain a monument to its incompetence.
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