Eurobloat #0169 • May 2024
May was the month the Union signed off the world's first artificial-intelligence rulebook, adopted a migration pact that fines members twenty thousand euros per person they decline, and helped itself to the interest on assets it does not own. A productive spring for the people who never have to live under any of it.
Folly of the Month: The world's first AI rulebook, written by the people who brought you the tethered bottle cap
On 21 May the Council gave its final green light to the Artificial Intelligence Act, the planet's first comprehensive AI law, before a single member state had built anything anyone wanted to regulate. Brussels has no AI champion of its own, so it has done the next best thing and appointed itself referee of everybody else's, complete with risk tiers, conformity assessments and fines reaching seven per cent of global turnover. The continent that gave the world the cookie banner now proposes to grade the future, and calls being first to legislate the same thing as being first to invent. The rules will arrive long before the industry does.
1. Pay twenty thousand euros per migrant you will not take
On 14 May the Council adopted the Pact on Migration and Asylum, whose centrepiece is a "mandatory solidarity" scheme: relocate the people Brussels allocates you, or pay twenty thousand euros a head to refuse them. A national border policy is now a line item, priced by the Commission, payable to a fund. The open-borders project that could not control the frontier has settled instead on invoicing the members who notice.
2. The interest on money that is not theirs
Also on 21 May, the Council greenlit skimming the "net windfall profits" from immobilised Russian assets and routing them, in large part, through the European Peace Facility. The legal trick is to insist the profits are not sovereign assets even though the principal plainly is. A new revenue stream that belongs to nobody, spent by Brussels, is exactly the kind of "own resource" the Union has wanted for years, and a frozen central bank was kind enough to provide the pretext.
3. Policing the planet's supply chains from a desk in Brussels
On 24 May the Council adopted the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, ordering large companies to audit human rights and the environment across their entire global value chains on pain of fines up to five per cent of worldwide turnover. A continent that struggles to police its own external border now volunteers to police cobalt mines on other continents. The paperwork lands in Europe; the cobalt stays exactly where it was.
4. A directive to make Brussels build a repair website
On 30 May the Council gave final approval to the right-to-repair directive, which among other things commissions a "European online platform" so consumers can find someone to fix a toaster. The market that has run repair shops since the invention of the toaster apparently required a Union web portal and a twelve-month guarantee extension to function. Somewhere a civil servant is now responsible for the uptime of the continent's spanner directory.
5. After seven years, the schoolmaster runs out of detentions
On 29 May the Commission closed the Article 7 rule-of-law procedure against Poland, the disciplinary process it had run since 2017 against an elected national government. Seven years of lectures, frozen funds and grave communiqués ended not with a verdict but with a change of administration in Warsaw and a quiet handshake. The lesson the Union drew was that its scrutiny works; the lesson everyone else drew was that it only ever stops when the right people win.
6. Brussels appoints itself editor of Facebook
Carried into May, the Commission's freshly opened Digital Services Act proceedings against Facebook and Instagram pressed on, with Brussels fretting that Meta had retired an election-monitoring tool without its permission. The Union that cannot agree on its own foreign policy now demands a real-time civic-discourse dashboard from an American firm, backed by fines worth six per cent of global revenue. Free speech, Brussels-style, means a regulator deciding which posts you were allowed to be shown.
7. The Commission bans a phone app for being too fun
Through May the Commission pursued TikTok over TikTok Lite, whose crime was a rewards feature the regulator deemed too "addictive", having opened proceedings and threatened suspension in April. Grown adults, in the Brussels worldview, must be shielded from collecting points on their telephones by a directorate-general that has never met them. The nanny has discovered the smartphone, and she does not approve.
→ digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu
8. The late-payment cure that small firms begged Brussels to drop
In May the backlash against the Commission's proposed Late Payment Regulation reached full volume, as trade bodies warned that hard-capping payment terms at thirty days would blow a roughly two-trillion-euro hole in the financing small firms actually rely on. A rule sold as protecting small business was loudly rejected by small business, which understands its own cash flow rather better than a directorate does. The cure had to be shelved before it could kill the patient.
9. The nature law nobody could pass, blocked by the countries that have to live with it
By mid-May the Nature Restoration Law was still stranded, with a clutch of member states refusing the qualified majority after Hungary, Italy, Poland and others balked at overburdening farmers and food security. Eleven capitals were reduced to writing a polite letter begging the holdouts to fold before the next meeting. For once the centralising machine jammed, because the people who would have to plough the consequences declined to be voted into them.
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