Eurobloat #0170 • June 2024
June was the month the voters spoke, the rulers decided not to listen, and the surveillance state had to be quietly wheeled back into the garage when it turned out nobody would vote for it.
Folly of the Month: the message-scanning law too toxic to face a vote
On 20 June the Council abruptly pulled its planned vote on "Chat Control", the proposal to scan everyone's private messages for banned content, because it could not assemble a majority. A measure that would turn every phone in Europe into a search target proved so indefensible that its own backers dared not put it to the table. That Brussels keeps reaching for this power, and keeps having to hide it again, tells you the instinct never dies; it only waits.
1. Killed again, certain to return
This was not the first time the scanning plan had been shelved, and it would not be the last. The proposal is a zombie: voted down, buried, and back on the menu within months.
2. The voters deliver a rebuke
The European Parliament elections of 6 to 9 June sent a record hard-right contingent to Strasbourg, with anti-establishment parties surging across the bloc. The continent's verdict on the project was, to put it gently, unenthusiastic.
3. The vote that blew up France
The result was so bad for Emmanuel Macron that he gambled on a snap national election, plunging France into months of turmoil. A European election that detonates a member state's government is a sign of a project straining at the seams.
→ pbs.org
4. The centre's response: change nothing
Having kept its majority, the pro-EU bloc concluded that the answer to a hard-right surge was to carry on exactly as before. Ignoring the electorate is, by now, the establishment's settled strategy.
5. Apple, first into the dock under the DMA
On 24 June the Commission made Apple the first company charged under the Digital Markets Act, with preliminary findings that its App Store rules broke the law. The fining machine had found its inaugural target, and it was, predictably, American.
→ digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu
6. Wagging the finger at the capitals
On 19 June the Commission announced excessive-deficit procedures against France, Italy, Belgium and others, lecturing elected governments on their spending. The same institution would, within a year, suspend those very rules the moment it wanted to borrow for defence.
7. Scanning, dressed up as child protection
As ever, the message-scanning plan was sold as protecting children, the unanswerable cause invoked to license mass surveillance. Worthy ends do not make a wiretap on the whole continent a good idea.
8. A bloc deaf to its own electorate
The clearest message of June was the distance between the rulers and the ruled, and the rulers' serene determination to maintain it. A union confident in its own legitimacy would not need to be quite so deaf.
9. The surveillance reflex, only resting
Chat Control's retreat was a reprieve, not a defeat. The appetite in Brussels to read what its citizens write is a constant; only the political weather forces it, now and then, to wait.
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