Eurobloat #0189 • January 2026
The new year opened with the rare and welcome spectacle of Brussels quietly dismantling parts of the digital rulebook it had spent a decade calling sacred, while mourning the fading of its power to impose that rulebook on everyone else.
Folly of the Month: the end of the Brussels effect, and good riddance
Commentators concluded this month that the so-called Brussels effect is over, that Washington now sets the pace, and that the Union's power to export its rules to the rest of the planet is draining away. In Brussels this is told as a tragedy. For everyone who never voted for its rulebook and simply had to obey it, the shrinking of the EU's regulatory reach is a quiet liberation. An institution whose chief ambition was to bind the whole world in its paperwork is discovering that the world has other ideas, and the wounded pride is a wonder to behold.
→ soton.ac.uk → corporateeurope.org
1. The GDPR, eased at last
After a decade of cookie banners, consent pop-ups and compliance theatre, Brussels began unwinding its own data rules. The relief is real; the only mystery is why it took ten years and a competitiveness panic for the Union to notice that the law was strangling the businesses it claimed to help.
2. Brussels takes a bow for clearing its own mess
The Commission proudly announced that trimming farm paperwork would save farmers up to €215 million and a fifth of their admin time. Cutting red tape is splendid; expecting applause for removing a fraction of the red tape you yourself laid down is a touch much.
3. Even the Commission admits it is too much
The 2026 Annual Single Market and Competitiveness Report, presented on 30 January, listed administrative burdens, overregulation and the so-called terrible ten barriers among the drags on the bloc, and made simplification a headline theme. When even Brussels concedes its rules are this heavy, it tells you how heavy they had become.
→ single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu
4. Meanwhile, sharpening the knives for Big Tech
With one hand easing rules, with the other the Union readied an aggressive year of Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act enforcement, with fresh probes lined up against Google, Meta, Apple and X. Fining the world's most useful companies for the crime of being large is precisely the habit the EU should be dropping, not doubling.
5. A rulebook even the experts cannot track
Data-protection lawyers struggled to follow January's shifting enforcement picture. When the specialists paid to read the rules cannot keep up, the ordinary citizen and the small firm have no chance, which is an argument for fewer rules, not more guidance.
6. Forty-seven new initiatives, in the name of simplicity
The 2026 work programme set out forty-seven legislative initiatives, with twenty-five of them waving the banner of simplification. Genuine simplification would mean fewer laws; Brussels simplification means four dozen new ones with a tidier cover.
7. And a Digital Fairness Act on the way
Among the promised laws sits a Digital Fairness Act, due in the final quarter of the year, fresh digital rules arriving even as the old digital rules are loudly cut. The machine adds faster than it subtracts, and somehow only ever grows.
8. Consultation strictly by invitation
The rollback was shaped through a closed industry process rather than the public consultations Brussels usually advertises. The Union that lectures the world on transparency drafts its biggest reforms behind a closed door.
9. The confession nobody in Brussels will make
Unpicking the GDPR, the AI Act and the rest amounts to an admission that the great decade of digital rule-making went too far. The reversal is welcome; the silence about who was responsible, and what it all cost, is deafening.
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