Eurobloat #0167 • March 2024
March was the month the Commission discovered it could fine an American company nearly two billion euros for the crime of not advertising its competitors, then turned to your private messages and your face. More Europe, as ever, and somehow less of everything you owned.
Folly of the Month: Apple billed 1.84 billion euros for not running adverts for Spotify
On 4 March the Commission fined Apple 1.84 billion euros, its third-largest penalty ever, for not telling iPhone users that they could buy music subscriptions more cheaply elsewhere. The conduct itself, by the Commission's own arithmetic, was worth about 40 million euros. The other 1.8 billion was invented out of thin air for what Brussels called non-monetary harm and deterrence, which is a confident way of saying we made the number up to look frightening. A complaint lodged by Spotify, a European champion that pays its taxes in Sweden, was answered with a transfer of nearly two billion euros from a foreign firm into the EU budget. Competition policy, or a toll booth with a press release.
1. The Digital Markets Act switches on, and three companies are guilty within a fortnight
The DMA came into full force on 7 March, designating six firms as gatekeepers and ordering them to redesign their products to Brussels's taste. By 25 March the Commission had already opened non-compliance investigations into Apple, Alphabet and Meta, which suggests either that the rules are unworkable or that the point was always the investigations. Penalties run to ten per cent of global turnover, rising to twenty for repeat offenders, so the threats now outweigh the products.
→ digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu
2. Parliament passes the world's first AI Act, complete with the surveillance it pretends to ban
On 13 March MEPs adopted the AI Act by 523 votes to 46, hailing a ban on untargeted facial scraping and real-time biometric surveillance. Read the small print and the ban dissolves into exceptions: police may use live facial recognition in public after all, for a generous list of purposes. Europe has written the planet's longest rulebook on a technology it does not build, and reserved the cameras for itself.
3. The top court rules the fingerprint law illegal, then orders everyone to keep obeying it
On 21 March the Court of Justice declared Regulation 2019/1157, which forces fingerprints onto national identity cards, invalid because it was adopted on the wrong legal basis. Having found the law unlawful, the Court ordered that it stay in force until the end of 2026 while Brussels passes the same thing again on a tidier footing. The compulsory biometrics survive; only the embarrassment is temporary.
4. The Media Freedom Act arrives to protect the press from everyone except the people writing it
Also on 13 March Parliament passed the European Media Freedom Act, an EU rulebook for newspapers in the name of media independence. It forbids governments from spying on journalists, then carves out a case-by-case exception permitting exactly that spyware where a judge agrees. Brussels has decided that the way to keep the press free of state interference is a fresh layer of state interference, drafted in Brussels.
5. Chat Control returns to the drawing board to find a politer way to read your messages
On 27 March the Council presidency circulated a fresh compromise text of the child-protection regulation that critics call Chat Control. The technical solution remains client-side scanning, which inspects your messages on your own phone before encryption can protect them, then forwards anything flagged to the authorities. The branding keeps changing, the surveillance of every private conversation in Europe does not.
6. The corporate due-diligence directive is gutted to pass, and nobody asks why it was so heavy
On 15 March member states scraped together a majority for a heavily watered-down Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, after the vote had been postponed five times and Germany abstained. The thresholds were raised so high that most firms now escape it, which is presented as a triumph. The honest lesson, that Brussels spent years drafting a burden so crushing it had to be hollowed out to survive, goes unmentioned.
7. Parliament votes to police your washing-up before you have rinsed a plate
On 12 March MEPs adopted their position on the Green Claims Directive, threatening fines of at least four per cent of turnover for businesses whose environmental boasts have not been pre-approved within a thirty-day assessment window. Calling a product green will now require a verifier, a deadline and a Brussels-shaped procedure. The consumer who simply wanted a kettle is, as usual, paying for the bureaucracy that protects him.
8. Brussels sets binding targets for how much dinner you are allowed to throw away
On 13 March, by 514 votes to 20, Parliament backed binding food-waste reduction targets reaching forty per cent per capita in retail and households, plus new producer levies on textiles. The Union that cannot agree its own borders has found time to legislate the leftovers in your fridge. Each household across twenty-seven nations is now a line item in a continental waste plan.
9. The summit invents a windfall and a fund, and grows the budget that follows
At the European Council of 21 and 22 March, leaders agreed to skim the windfall profits of immobilised Russian assets and route them through EU programmes, while pressing for more common defence spending steered from the centre. The mechanism is novel, the instinct is familiar: every crisis becomes an argument for a larger pot of money administered in Brussels rather than in the capitals that raised it.
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