Eurobloat #0178 • February 2025
February was the month the EU started banning software, just as a visiting American vice-president stood up in Paris and Munich to tell it, in plain terms, that it was strangling the future and abandoning free speech.
Folly of the Month: the bloc that cannot build a tech giant starts outlawing the technology
On 2 February the first prohibitions under the AI Act took effect, with Brussels banning whole categories of artificial intelligence outright. There is something painfully telling about a continent that has not produced a single tech champion to rival America or China rushing, ahead of everyone, to criminalise the technology rather than build it. The instinct to prohibit before you have learned to compete is the European disease in miniature.
→ digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu
1. Told off in Paris
At the AI summit on 11 February, United States Vice-President JD Vance warned Europe against "excessive regulation" and said Washington would not accept others tightening the screws on American firms. The hosts had expected applause for their rulebook; they got a lecture.
2. Told off again in Munich
Days later at the Munich Security Conference, Vance accused the EU of retreating from free speech and its own democratic values, pointing squarely at the censorship built into its digital laws. When your closest ally devotes a keynote to your speech rules, the speech rules are the scandal.
3. The great deregulation begins, behind closed doors
On 26 February the Commission unveiled its Omnibus I package, finally moving to cut the sustainability rules choking business. Lightening the load is exactly right; doing it through short, invitation-only consultations stuffed with corporate lobbyists shows the EU cannot even deregulate without cutting corners.
4. A "moral necessity", repealed within the year
The package gutted the corporate due-diligence directive that had entered into force only in July 2024, the law Brussels had sold as a moral imperative. A solemn duty that lasts seven months before being quietly dismantled was never a conviction, only a fashion.
→ fidh.org
5. Climbing down under pressure, and calling it strategy
Analysts noted the digital climbdown was being driven in part by American pressure, leaving the EU looking less like a sovereign rule-maker than a bloc backpedalling when leaned on. The much-vaunted Brussels effect works only until someone pushes back.
→ ecfr.eu
6. An admission dressed as a strategy
The Competitiveness Compass unveiled weeks earlier had promised to cut reporting burdens by at least a quarter, an implicit confession that the rules were a quarter too heavy. Brussels will admit it over-regulated only in the language of management consultancy.
7. The lobby that wants the red tape kept
Some 270 campaign groups wrote to demand the deregulation be abandoned, insisting the rules stay exactly as smothering as before. There is always a coalition in Brussels whose dearest cause is the preservation of paperwork.
8. Banning first, understanding later
The AI prohibitions arrived complete with the usual vagueness about what exactly is forbidden, leaving developers to guess. A law that bans things nobody can quite define is a fog with penalties attached.
→ digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu
9. Strangling at home, begging for competitiveness abroad
In a single month Brussels banned categories of AI, published a strategy lamenting its lack of competitiveness, and was told by its allies that the two are connected. The diagnosis writes itself; only the patient refuses to read it.
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