Eurobloat #0164 • December 2023
December is the season of goodwill, so Brussels gave the world a gift: rules for a technology it does not build, written by people who have never shipped a line of code. It then wrapped up the year by appointing itself the moderator of Elon Musk's timeline and the desert paymaster of Tunisia.
Folly of the Month: The world's first law for an industry Europe does not have
After thirty-six hours of negotiation that ran into the small hours of 9 December, the Council and Parliament struck a provisional deal on the AI Act, which the press release proudly called the first such law on earth. Note the framing. Europe leads the world not in building artificial intelligence, but in regulating it, and a new AI Office inside the Commission will now grade the "foundation models" that European companies have conspicuously failed to produce. Brussels cannot manufacture a frontier model, so it has done the next best thing and manufactured a frontier rulebook, complete with tiers of risk, transparency obligations and the warm certainty that the firms affected are almost all American.
1. A "historic" migration pact that shares everyone else's problem
On 20 December, after years of deadlock, negotiators agreed five laws to "reform" asylum, the centrepiece being a solidarity mechanism that obliges member states to take in relocated migrants or pay to opt out. The countries that never wanted the arrivals are thus invited to fund the consequences of a border the EU has failed to control. Brussels calls this solidarity. The rest of us call it a redistribution scheme dressed as a breakthrough.
2. The summit where a leader had to leave so the cheque could clear
At the 14-15 December summit, EU leaders opened accession talks with Ukraine only after Viktor Orban was persuaded to step out of the room, a manoeuvre officials described as "pre-agreed and constructive". He then promptly vetoed the fifty billion euro aid package and the budget review from the corridor. A union that requires unanimity, and resolves it by escorting the dissenter out for coffee, is not a model of consensus so much as a monument to its absence.
3. Brussels appoints itself referee of Elon Musk's timeline
On 18 December the Commission opened its first formal Digital Services Act proceedings, against X, citing disinformation, content moderation and the wickedness of the blue tick. The threatened penalty runs to six per cent of global turnover. The EU produces no comparable platform of its own, yet it has decided that the correct response to an American social network is a European fine.
4. A court rules your credit score is a robot decision
On 7 December the Court of Justice held in the Schufa case that calculating a credit score is "automated individual decision-making" under the GDPR, and therefore presumptively prohibited. Lenders across the continent now wonder whether the ordinary act of deciding who can repay a loan needs special legal cover. Another everyday transaction, solemnly reclassified as a data-protection hazard.
5. It is now illegal to bin your own unsold socks
The Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, provisionally agreed on 4 December, bans large companies from destroying unsold textiles and footwear, with the Commission empowered to extend the ban to other goods by delegated act later. The micro-managing of warehouse inventories is, apparently, a matter for twenty-seven governments. Note the delegated act: the real reach is the open door to ban whatever Brussels fancies next, without bothering Parliament again.
6. Paying Tunisia to do the border work Brussels will not
On 20 December the Commission pressed ahead with its Tunisia partnership, channelling fresh money to Tunis despite the Ombudsman, MEPs and human rights groups warning about the conduct of the very forces being funded. The bloc that lectures everyone on values is quietly outsourcing its frontier to a regime it would rather not discuss in public. The open-borders rhetoric and the desert-dumping cheque travel under the same roof.
7. The gig-work deal that fell over within nine days
On 13 December negotiators triumphantly announced a Platform Work Directive to reclassify gig workers and police workplace algorithms. By 22 December the Spanish presidency admitted member states could not muster a majority and the whole thing collapsed, to be handed to the Belgians in January. Nine days from "deal" to dead, which is a brisk pace even by Brussels standards.
8. A "decarbonised" gas market for a continent short of gas
On 8 December the Council and Parliament finalised the gas package, a sprawling regulatory framework for renewable gases and a hydrogen economy that barely exists, complete with integrated network planning. Europe spent the previous winter scrambling for any molecule of energy it could buy. Its answer is a thicker rulebook for the fuels it has not yet got.
9. New rules for industrial designs, because there were not enough
On 5 December negotiators struck a provisional deal on a revised regulation and directive for industrial designs, "modernising" protection across the single market. Somewhere a chair, a teapot and a font are now subject to refreshed EU paperwork. The single market it was meant to simplify keeps acquiring new layers, each one announced as a simplification.
→ single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu
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