Peter's Path - Eurobloat

Eurobloat #0192 • April 2026

hello@peterspath.net (Peter) — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:00:00 +0000

April was the month Brussels announced it would cut its own red tape, which sounds splendid until you read the small print and find that the real project is to pull yet more power up from the member states to the centre.</p>

Folly of the Month: "deregulation" that is really a power grab</h2>
On 28 April the Commission published its 2026 Better Regulation Communication, with a "Regulatory Deep Cleaning" promising to tidy twelve policy areas at once. Cutting red tape would be wonderful. But the plan's engine is to favour regulations over directives and full harmonisation over partial, which in plain terms means moving lawmaking out of national parliaments and into Brussels. Real deregulation would hand power back to the nations; this hands more to the centre and dresses it up as housekeeping. The mop is for show; the other hand is reaching for the controls.</p>
→ thegoodlobby.eu</a> → commission.europa.eu</a></p>

1. The court decides which laws a nation may pass</h3>
On 21 April the Court of Justice ruled that Hungary broke EU law by adopting its own legislation on LGBTI matters, whatever one thinks of that law. A union that began as a customs arrangement now strikes down the statutes of an elected national parliament, which is precisely the centralisation that ought to be running the other way.</p>
→ curia.europa.eu</a></p>

2. The six-billion-euro bailout it should not have waved through</h3>
On 23 April the Court dismissed Lufthansa's appeal and upheld the annulment of the Commission's approval of Germany's €6 billion recapitalisation of the airline during the pandemic. The body that polices state aid turns out to be rather bad at it when a large member state is the one asking.</p>
→ eunews.it</a></p>

3. Six per cent of the planet, if Meta does not police your birthday</h3>
On 29 April the Commission preliminarily found Meta in breach of the Digital Services Act for not stopping under-thirteens from signing up to Facebook and Instagram, with a possible fine of up to six per cent of worldwide turnover. The remedy on offer is more identity checking, more age verification and more scanning of who you are before you may post, which is the surveillance state wearing a child-protection badge.</p>
→ socialmediatoday.com</a></p>

4. Even Washington calls the Space Act overreach</h3>
United States officials described the proposed EU Space Act as complicated overreach reaching well beyond Europe's orbit. When the country with the rockets thinks your space rules go too far, you have achieved something.</p>
→ satellitetoday.com</a></p>

5. Even the friendly think tank smells a rat</h3>
Bruegel, a Brussels institution to its bones, judged that the Commission's renewed promise of "better regulation" was yet to be proven. When even the house analysts suspect the deregulation is more talk than substance, scepticism is well placed.</p>
→ bruegel.org</a></p>

6. The activists who want the red tape kept</h3>
Campaign groups launched "Hands Off Nature" and "Rules to Protect" to fight the tidy-up, demanding Brussels keep piling on the very rules that smother enterprise. There is something fitting about a lobby whose great cause is the preservation of paperwork.</p>
→ corporateeurope.org</a></p>

7. Harmonising away what is left of national choice</h3>
By preferring full harmonisation, the plan strips member states of the flexibility to tailor rules to their own people. The word on the tin says simpler; the contents say one size, decided in Brussels, for everyone.</p>
→ thegoodlobby.eu</a></p>

8. The cigarette-filter reading room</h3>
On 21 April the Court held that where a health directive leans on international standards, citizens must at least be allowed to read them. Somewhere in this is a serious point about the rule of law, and also the image of a Union that needed a tribunal to discover that people should be able to see the rules binding them.</p>
→ theunionreport.eu</a></p>

9. The European Central Bank has thoughts, again</h3>
On 9 April the ECB issued yet another of its formal legal opinions, because no corner of economic life is complete without one. The institution that cannot resist an opinion duly supplied another.</p>
→ ecb.europa.eu</a></p>

Eurobloat #0191 • March 2026

hello@peterspath.net (Peter) — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 16:00:00 +0000

March found the project busy at its favourite hobby, centralisation, dreaming up a twenty-eighth kind of company to sit above the member states, while finally stumbling towards the border control it had spent decades deriding, and conceding that its much-trumpeted AI Act could not actually be obeyed on time.</p>

Folly of the Month: now incorporating, EU Inc.</h2>
On 18 March the Commission proposed a "28th regime", a brand-new EU-wide company form to sit on top of the twenty-seven that the member states already run perfectly well. The supposed cure for twenty-seven sets of company law is, naturally, a twenty-eighth, written in Brussels and layered over the lot. It is centralisation sold as convenience: another rung of law, another reason for power to drift from the capitals to the centre, and another solution in search of a problem.</p>
→ ey.com</a></p>

1. Border control at last, by the most graceless route imaginable</h3>
On 26 March the Parliament voted to let member states build "return hubs" outside the Union and to remove failed asylum seekers to them. Restoring control of the borders is sensible and overdue; the spectacle is the Union that spent twenty years calling such measures xenophobic now lurching to the opposite extreme overnight, with no apparent memory of its earlier sermons.</p>
→ euronews.com</a></p>

2. Brussels picks the winners</h3>
New industrial measures unveiled on 4 March would impose local-content requirements on large foreign investments in steel, batteries, solar and the rest. The single market sold as openness now arrives with a "buy European" clause and a planner in Brussels deciding who deserves to invest.</p>
→ commission.europa.eu</a></p>

3. The world-beating AI Act, postponed by its own author</h3>
Parliament backed delaying key AI Act rules to 2027. Easing off a law that threatened to throttle European innovation is the right instinct; the embarrassment is that Brussels lectured the planet about its gold standard and then could not bring itself to switch the thing on.</p>
→ euperspectives.eu</a></p>

4. Meanwhile, the great war on "nudifier" apps</h3>
In the same session the Parliament found time to back a ban on "nudifier" apps. It is reassuring to know the continent's finest legislative minds are deployed exactly where they are needed least.</p>
→ euperspectives.eu</a></p>

5. More cybersecurity rules atop the cybersecurity rules</h3>
The Commission floated further NIS2 reforms, including new ransomware-reporting duties, before the existing directive is even fully in place. Why wait for a rule to bed in when you can amend it first.</p>
→ skadden.com</a></p>

6. Another decade, another consultation</h3>
On 20 March the Commission opened a four-week call for evidence and a twelve-week consultation on the post-2030 renewable energy framework. Democracy, in Brussels, increasingly means filling in a form and waiting for the form to ignore you.</p>
→ energy.ec.europa.eu</a></p>

7. The Union will decide which adjectives you may use</h3>
Under the Empowering Consumers regime, generic claims such as "eco-friendly" and "sustainable" will be banned unless blessed by an approved scheme. Brussels has progressed from regulating products to regulating vocabulary.</p>
→ cooley.com</a></p>

8. Ready to ring the Taliban, in your name</h3>
The returns law expressly permits cooperation with non-recognised regimes, prompting one MEP to warn it gave a green light to dealing with the Taliban to force Afghans back. There is a serious way to control a border, and there is whatever this is.</p>
→ euronews.com</a></p>

9. The green rulebook nobody can keep up with</h3>
On 17 March the Commission published yet more draft revisions to the EU taxonomy's climate and environmental delegated acts, the latest rewrite of a sustainability rulebook that changes faster than any business can comply. The rules on what counts as green are themselves not built to last.</p>
→ kpmg.com</a></p>

Eurobloat #0190 • February 2026

hello@peterspath.net (Peter) — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 16:00:00 +0000

February brought the welcome bonfire of a great heap of corporate paperwork, alongside the less edifying sight of Brussels defending an arbitrary nine-figure fine against X and being told, by Washington, that its rules amount to censorship.</p>

Folly of the Month: seventy per cent of "essential" turns out to be optional</h2>
On 24 February the Council gave its final blessing to the Sustainability Omnibus, cutting the corporate reporting rules Brussels had spent years calling indispensable. The flagship standard fell from 1,073 data points to 320, a seventy per cent reduction. Slashing this nonsense is exactly right and long overdue. The folly is that the Union built the 1,073-box monster in the first place, forced businesses across the continent to spend years and fortunes feeding it, and now expects gratitude for the cull, with not a word about who is answerable for the waste.</p>
→ regulationtomorrow.com</a> → sedex.com</a></p>

1. Seven hundred "vital" disclosures, quietly binned</h3>
The reporting standard shed roughly seven hundred data points overnight. Every one of them was once declared essential, and businesses paid dearly to supply them; their sudden disappearance is the clearest confession yet that most of it was never needed.</p>
→ sedex.com</a></p>

2. The "moral necessity" turned out to be negotiable</h3>
The same package watered down and delayed the corporate due-diligence directive, the law sold barely a year earlier as a moral imperative. It is a relief to see the burden eased, though it does rather expose how quickly Brussels morality folds once the compliance bill arrives.</p>
→ cliffordchance.com</a></p>

3. The arbitrary fine heads to court, and good for X</h3>
On 16 February X filed its challenge at the General Court to the €120 million Digital Services Act fine handed down in December, arguing the investigation was superficial, the process biased and its rights of defence trampled. A penalty the Commission set without any clear formula, on the strength of how grave it judged the offence to be, deserves to be tested by judges, and the firm that pushes back against Brussels regulatory adventurism does the rest of us a favour.</p>
→ adfinternational.org</a></p>

4. A trade war, in pursuit of a fine</h3>
With Brussels promising ever tougher tech enforcement in 2026, the Trump administration threatened substantial retaliatory tariffs and a Section 301 trade investigation should the Union keep targeting American technology firms. Picking fights with the world's most successful companies, and the country they come from, is not regulation; it is a vendetta the Union cannot afford.</p>
→ techpolicy.press</a></p>

5. Washington puts the censorship charge in writing</h3>
On 3 February a United States congressional committee published the second part of its "Foreign Censorship Threat" report, accusing the Digital Services Act of policing what people may say. When a foreign legislature writes a report about your speech rules, your speech rules are the problem.</p>
→ euobserver.com</a></p>

6. The Union cannot keep its own story straight</h3>
Brussels spent a decade declaring the GDPR an inviolable shield, and now, mid-rewrite, even its own consumer body was left protesting about the changes. An institution this confused about its own flagship law might pause before writing the next one.</p>
→ beuc.eu</a></p>

7. The plan to read everyone's messages grinds on</h3>
On 26 February the negotiators met again over the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation, the so called Chat Control that would push providers towards scanning private messages and so towards breaking the encryption that protects everyone. Dressing mass surveillance of lawful citizens up as child protection is the oldest trick Brussels owns, and the fact that the scheme will not die is reason enough to keep watching it.</p>
→ europarl.europa.eu</a></p>

9. Simplification as a permanent confession</h3>
The Commission spent the month trailing yet more simplification packages, in energy, tax and beyond. Each new bonfire of rules is welcome, and each is also an admission of how much needless rule-making Brussels keeps producing in the first place.</p>
→ energy.ec.europa.eu</a></p>

Eurobloat #0189 • January 2026

hello@peterspath.net (Peter) — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 16:00:00 +0000

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.</p>

Folly of the Month: the end of the Brussels effect, and good riddance</h2>
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.</p>
→ soton.ac.uk</a> → corporateeurope.org</a></p>

2. Brussels takes a bow for clearing its own mess</h3>
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.</p>
→ agriculture.ec.europa.eu</a></p>

3. Even the Commission admits it is too much</h3>
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.</p>
→ single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu</a></p>

4. Meanwhile, sharpening the knives for Big Tech</h3>
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.</p>
→ irishtimes.com</a></p>

5. A rulebook even the experts cannot track</h3>
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.</p>
→ gibsondunn.com</a></p>

6. Forty-seven new initiatives, in the name of simplicity</h3>
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.</p>
→ commission.europa.eu</a></p>

7. And a Digital Fairness Act on the way</h3>
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.</p>
→ europarl.europa.eu</a></p>

8. Consultation strictly by invitation</h3>
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.</p>
→ corporateeurope.org</a></p>

9. The confession nobody in Brussels will make</h3>
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.</p>
→ corporateeurope.org</a></p>

Eurobloat #0188 • December 2025

hello@peterspath.net (Peter) — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 16:00:00 +0000

December delivered the Digital Services Act's first big fine, an arbitrary €120 million conjured out of X, along with yet another retreat on deforestation and a stirring new crackdown on dangerous toys.</p>

Folly of the Month: a €120 million fine, plucked from the air</h2>
On 5 December the Commission issued its first Digital Services Act non-compliance fine, €120 million against X, partly for letting users pay for a blue tick. Asked how the figure was reached, the Commission offered only the "nature, gravity and duration" of the infringements and the word "proportionality", with no published method and, by one Washington account, no simple economic formula at all. A fine without a method is not enforcement; it is a number chosen because it sounded suitably large.</p>
→ digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu</a></p>

1. Fined for a tick</h3>
The penalty broke down as €45 million for the verification badge, €35 million for advertising transparency and €40 million for researcher access. Brussels has put a price on a blue checkmark, and it is forty-five million euros.</p>
→ goodwinlaw.com</a></p>

2. The first of many, the Commission promises</h3>
Lawyers read the fine as the moment the DSA entered its enforcement phase, with more to come. A formula nobody can explain is about to be applied to the rest of the internet.</p>
→ medialaws.eu</a></p>

3. A new transatlantic flashpoint</h3>
The fine instantly became a diplomatic incident, with American officials accusing Brussels of weaponising regulation against a United States company. The Union's idea of leadership is increasingly to fine its allies and call it sovereignty.</p>
→ epicenternetwork.eu</a></p>

4. Even friendly analysts call it overreach</h3>
On 11 December a Washington think tank argued the X fine highlighted Europe's growing regulatory overreach. The reputation Brussels is building abroad is not the one it imagines.</p>
→ itif.org</a></p>

5. The deforestation law, postponed yet again</h3>
On 18 December the Council signed off a revision to "simplify and postpone" the deforestation regulation, the latest delay to a law that has lurched from crisis to crisis since birth. A rule the Union cannot bring itself to actually enforce is a rule that perhaps should not have been written this way.</p>
→ consilium.europa.eu</a></p>

6. At last, the menace of unsafe toys</h3>
On 23 December the Commission trumpeted stronger toy-safety rules, a new regulation entering into force on 1 January 2026, because no corner of the nursery is beyond the reach of fresh Brussels paperwork. Father Christmas now files for compliance.</p>
→ single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu</a></p>

7. Chat Control shuffles towards the finish line</h3>
Privacy campaigners warned that the long-running "Chat Control" plan to scan private messages was nearing its final hurdle. The idea refuses to die, because the urge to read everyone's messages is, for some in Brussels, eternal.</p>
→ eff.org</a></p>

8. The Digital Omnibus, now in full</h3>
The detailed Digital Omnibus text landed, easing the GDPR, the AI Act and the Data Act all at once. Lightening this load is welcome; doing it by reopening three landmark laws in a single bundle is how Brussels moves a great deal past everyone while admitting none of it was wise to begin with.</p>
→ jonesday.com</a></p>

9. The 2035 engine ban, quietly reversed</h3>
On 16 December the Commission proposed letting carmakers meet a 90% emissions cut by 2035 rather than the 100% combustion-engine ban it had passed with such fanfare, reviving hybrids, e-fuels and the internal combustion engine. The flagship climate policy was unpicked barely two years after it was set in stone, which rather invites the question of why it was set in stone.</p>
→ euronews.com</a></p>

Eurobloat #0187 • November 2025

hello@peterspath.net (Peter) — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 16:00:00 +0000

November gave us the project at its two extremes: reaching, yet again, for the power to scan everyone's private messages, while in the same breath beginning to dismantle some of the digital rules it had spent a decade insisting were untouchable.</p>

Folly of the Month: scanning your messages, checking your papers</h2>
On 26 November the Council reached a political agreement on the long-running "Chat Control" plan, by a close and divided vote, with the scope now stretched to cover text messages and videos. Bundled in is mandatory age verification before you may download a messaging app, a game with a chat function, or certain social platforms. A continent that claims to prize freedom now proposes to read its citizens' private conversations and demand their identity documents before they are allowed to say hello. This is not safety; it is surveillance with a child-protection sticker on the front, and it is the single worst idea Brussels entertained all month.</p>
→ compliancehub.wiki</a></p>

1. Papers, please, to send a message</h3>
The same plan would force you to prove your age before downloading the apps you use to talk to your friends. The right to a private word, once taken for granted, is being turned into a privilege granted on production of ID.</p>
→ patrick-breyer.de</a></p>

2. To its credit, the digital rulebook starts to shrink</h3>
On 19 November the Commission unveiled the Digital Omnibus to ease rules across the GDPR, the AI Act and the Data Act. Cutting this burden is genuinely welcome; the only puzzle is why Brussels spent ten years building monuments it now quietly chips away, while never quite admitting the monuments were a mistake.</p>
→ commission.europa.eu</a></p>

3. The AI Act clock, mercifully, stopped</h3>
The package "stops the clock" on the AI Act's high-risk obligations. Delaying a law that threatened to smother European innovation is the right call; the embarrassment is that Brussels paraded the thing as world-leading before discovering it could not bear to switch it on.</p>
→ skadden.com</a></p>

5. Even the Ombudsman says they cut corners</h3>
The European Ombudsman found that the Commission had rushed its packages through under claims of urgency, without proper impact assessments and with civil society shut out. When your own watchdog says you skipped the homework, you skipped the homework, whatever the merits of the result.</p>
→ business-humanrights.org</a></p>

6. A new law to handle complaints about the laws</h3>
On 17 November the Council adopted rules to speed up cross-border data-protection complaints. The bureaucracy now includes bureaucracy for processing grievances about the bureaucracy.</p>
→ consilium.europa.eu</a></p>

7. The lawyers start mapping the exits</h3>
Firms began publishing guides on the legal grounds for challenging EU overreach against companies based outside the Union. When the advice industry quietly draws the escape routes, the rules have plainly gone too far.</p>
→ mayerbrown.com</a></p>

8. Three landmark laws, reopened in one bundle</h3>
The GDPR, AI Act and Data Act were all reopened together in a single omnibus, the better to move a great deal past tired observers at once. Even sensible changes deserve daylight, and bundling is how Brussels turns scrutiny into homework nobody finishes.</p>
→ skadden.com</a></p>

9. And it still will not make Europe competitive</h3>
Bruegel concluded that even this grand unpicking would not, on its own, make EU digital services competitive. Years of rules, a dramatic partial bonfire, and the verdict is that the real problem was the whole approach.</p>
→ bruegel.org</a></p>

Eurobloat #0186 • October 2025

hello@peterspath.net (Peter) — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 16:00:00 +0000

October was the month the Parliament looked at the Commission's two-trillion-euro budget and balked, while the deforestation law staggered through yet another delay and the Council's message-scanning plan ran into a wall.</p>

Folly of the Month: a two-trillion-euro budget, too much even for the Parliament</h2>
On 30 October the European Parliament revolted against the Commission's proposed €2 trillion long-term budget, with its largest groups demanding it be redrawn. When even the institution that loves spending European money thinks the number is too big and too centralising, the number is too big and too centralising. The Commission's instinct, as ever, was to ask for more and let others explain why not.</p>
→ euronews.com</a></p>

1. The message-scanners hit a wall</h3>
The "Chat Control" vote pencilled in for 14 October was scrapped after Germany joined a blocking minority and the Danish presidency could not find a qualified majority. The idea that the state should scan everyone's private messages was beaten back yet again, though nobody in Brussels seems willing to let it rest for good.</p>
→ brusselssignal.eu</a></p>

2. The law so unworkable it had to be postponed again</h3>
On 21 October the Commission proposed yet another delay to its deforestation regulation, pushing application back to the end of 2026 for smaller operators and bolting on a fresh round of simplifications. A rule that has to be postponed and rewritten before it ever takes effect was perhaps not ready when it was passed.</p>
→ mayerbrown.com</a></p>

3. The Commission nobody can remove, made to sweat</h3>
On 9 October the von der Leyen Commission survived two motions of censure, one from the right and one from the left, both comfortably voted down. The executive that no voter ever directly chose at least had to spend an afternoon defending itself.</p>
→ euronews.com</a></p>

4. Brussels would like its own taxes, please</h3>
The budget fight turned on new "own resources", Brussels-speak for taxing tobacco, corporate turnover and the rest directly rather than asking member states. The Union has discovered that the surest way to grow is to raise its own money.</p>
→ ey.com</a></p>

5. A driving licence on your phone, whether you wanted one or not</h3>
On 21 October the Parliament backed a revised Driving Licence Directive, complete with a digital licence on your mobile, a two-year probationary regime for new drivers and disqualifications that follow you across every border. Brussels has decided that even the permit to drive your own car is something it ought to harmonise, digitise and supervise from the centre.</p>
→ sofiaglobe.com</a></p>

6. A blizzard of texts in two days</h3>
On 22 and 23 October the Parliament adopted a long list of texts, the routine output of a machine that legislates by the kilogram. Quantity, in Brussels, is mistaken for purpose.</p>
→ europarl.europa.eu</a></p>

7. The 2040 target, heroic on paper</h3>
Work pressed on to write a 90% emissions cut for 2040 into law, leaning on foreign carbon credits to make the sums add up. The ambition is for the press release; the offsets are for reality.</p>
→ climate.ec.europa.eu</a></p>

8. The 2035 engine ban heads for the workshop</h3>
Through the autumn the Commission prepared to soften its 2035 ban on new combustion cars after the industry pushed back. A flagship policy is being quietly dismantled, which rather invites the question of why it was set in stone.</p>
→ pbs.org</a></p>

9. Fingerprints at the border, please</h3>
On 12 October the Union switched on its Entry/Exit System, taking the fingerprints and facial images of every non-EU visitor crossing a Schengen border, the British included. A continent that lectures everyone else about privacy now files your biometrics the moment you arrive.</p>
→ home-affairs.ec.europa.eu</a></p>

Eurobloat #0185 • September 2025

hello@peterspath.net (Peter) — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 16:00:00 +0000

September is the month the project gathers to admire itself, and 2025 was no exception, with a State of the Union address whose answer to every ill was more Europe, even as two separate motions to sack the Commission were being drafted in the same building.</p>

Folly of the Month: the annual sermon, in which the cure is always more Europe</h2>
On 10 September Ursula von der Leyen delivered her State of the European Union address, calling for a "new Europe" that would take charge of its own defence, technology, energy and democratic future. Whatever the question, the answer from the rostrum is the same: more competence, more centralisation, more Brussels. It is a speech the Union could deliver in its sleep, and increasingly seems to.</p>
→ euronews.com</a></p>

1. Two motions to sack the Commission</h3>
While the President spoke of unity, both the left and the right tabled motions of censure against her Commission on 11 September, with the votes due in October. The applause in the chamber was, shall we say, conditional.</p>
→ eunews.it</a></p>

3. Even the Parliament resists the centralising of the farm fund</h3>
MEPs came out against the Commission's plan to fold farm spending into a single mega-fund, demanding it leave direct support for small farmers alone. When your own Parliament fights your power grab, it is quite the power grab.</p>
→ epthinktank.eu</a></p>

4. Now regulating your old jumper</h3>
The Parliament backed binding food-waste targets and extended producer responsibility for "fast fashion". Brussels has progressed from the single market to the contents of your wardrobe and your bin.</p>
→ epthinktank.eu</a></p>

5. The 2035 engine ban, quietly going into reverse</h3>
At its third automotive dialogue, chaired by von der Leyen on 12 September, the Commission put the review of the car CO2 rules on the table, opening the way to unpick the combustion-engine ban it had trumpeted only two years earlier. The flagship green policy lasted about as long as the applause that greeted it.</p>
→ euronews.com</a></p>

6. A 90% target, padded with foreign carbon credits</h3>
Work advanced on amending the Climate Law to set a 90% cut by 2040, with up to a thirty-third of it bought in as international credits under the Commission's proposal. The headline is heroic; the small print outsources the heavy lifting.</p>
→ europarl.europa.eu</a></p>

7. Simplifying the two-trillion-euro shopping trip</h3>
The Parliament moved to "simplify" the rules on roughly €2 trillion of annual public procurement, while keeping every social, environmental and local box to tick. Simplification, Brussels-style, leaves the boxes exactly where they were.</p>
→ epthinktank.eu</a></p>

8. Eyeing a digital tax it cannot legally levy alone</h3>
The Parliament's economists mused about a unilateral EU digital tax, conceding it may not be viable without an international deal. The appetite to tax runs well ahead of the authority to do so.</p>
→ epthinktank.eu</a></p>

9. Appointing itself guardian of democracy</h3>
Among the debates was a "European Democracy Shield" to protect the continent from foreign interference. The institution famed for ignoring its own referendums now offers to defend everyone else's democracy.</p>
→ epthinktank.eu</a></p>

Eurobloat #0184 • August 2025

hello@peterspath.net (Peter) — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 16:00:00 +0000

August was the month the AI Act began to bite, and the gold standard Brussels had paraded before the world was promptly denounced by Europe's own industrial champions, by America's tech giants, and by Washington, more or less in unison.</p>

Folly of the Month: the gold standard nobody wanted</h2>
On 2 August the AI Act's rules for general-purpose AI models started to apply, complete with a Code of Practice the Commission insisted was both voluntary and essential. Within weeks Europe's leading firms, the American giants and the United States government had all declared it a brake on the very innovation it claimed to enable. A law that unites your champions and your rivals against you is a rare diplomatic achievement.</p>
→ wired-gov.net</a></p>

1. Forty champions ask for the brakes</h3>
More than forty European companies, among them ASML, Philips, Siemens and Mistral, had called for a two-year "clock-stop" before the rules took hold. The continent's industrial flagships were begging Brussels not to do the thing Brussels was about to do.</p>
→ trendforce.com</a></p>

2. Google says it will slow Europe down</h3>
Google's Kent Walker warned that the Code risked slowing Europe's development and deployment of AI, even as the firm agreed to sign it. When the firms you hope will invest tell you your rules will drive them away, it is worth listening.</p>
→ euronews.com</a></p>

3. Meta says it will throttle the lot</h3>
Meta's Joel Kaplan went further, refusing to sign and calling the Code an overreach that would throttle the development and deployment of frontier AI in Europe. The Union prefers to read such verdicts as proof it is doing something right.</p>
→ techcrunch.com</a></p>

4. Written, conveniently, by the firms it binds</h3>
Civil society groups complained that United States tech companies had been given privileged access to shape the Code they would later have to follow. Regulatory capture is usually more discreet than this.</p>
→ techpolicy.press</a></p>

5. "Voluntary", in the Brussels sense</h3>
The Code was officially non-binding, which in practice meant firms ignored it at their peril. Brussels has perfected the voluntary rule you cannot afford to decline.</p>
→ digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu</a></p>

6. Washington calls it a threat to its own economy</h3>
On 7 August an American commentary branded EU regulatory overreach unacceptable for the United States' energy and economy. The Union's rules increasingly arrive with a diplomatic incident attached.</p>
→ dailysignal.com</a></p>

7. The trade deal that settled nothing</h3>
Even after the new EU-US trade framework, Washington left the Union's digital rules pointedly unresolved, with American criticism of the DSA and DMA flagged as grounds for fresh trade action. The truce, it turned out, did not cover the regulators.</p>
→ cov.com</a></p>

8. The Vance broadside still echoes</h3>
The American Vice-President's earlier warning at the Paris summit, that regulation should foster AI rather than strangle it, hung over the whole rollout. Brussels pressed the button regardless, as it tends to.</p>
→ euronews.com</a></p>

9. Copyright and transparency demands nobody can meet</h3>
The Code piled on transparency and copyright obligations that critics judged vague and unworkable, from unstandardised opt-out signals to summaries nobody could define. A rulebook that its own subjects cannot interpret is a lawsuit waiting to be filed.</p>
→ bruegel.org</a></p>

Eurobloat #0183 • July 2025

hello@peterspath.net (Peter) — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 16:00:00 +0000

July began with the Commission asking for two trillion euros, then casting about for new things to tax, from your vape to corporate turnover, and setting a 2040 climate target whose arithmetic quietly depends on credits bought abroad.</p>

Folly of the Month: two trillion euros, if you please</h2>
On 16 July the Commission unveiled its proposed budget for 2028 to 2034, leading with a headline of €2 trillion. To pay for it, Brussels floated a suite of new "own resources", taxes on tobacco, on corporate turnover and on electronic waste, so that it might raise money directly rather than ask the member states. An institution that responds to every difficulty by demanding a larger budget and its own taxing power is not economising; it is empire-building with a spreadsheet.</p>
→ commission.europa.eu</a></p>

1. New eurotaxes for your vape</h3>
On the same day the Commission moved to recast the Tobacco Taxation Directive, extending minimum taxes to e-cigarettes, heated tobacco and nicotine pouches. No habit is too small for Brussels to find a way to tax it.</p>
→ euronews.com</a></p>

2. A 90% target, with the hard part bought in</h3>
On 2 July the Commission proposed a binding 90% emissions cut for 2040, of which up to 3% could be met with international carbon credits from 2036. The ambition makes the headline; the offsets quietly do the work.</p>
→ commission.europa.eu</a></p>

3. The taxes Brussels would rather levy itself</h3>
Analysts noted that the new "own resources" were really a bid to let the Union tax citizens directly. The quiet ambition behind the budget is fiscal independence from the nations that fund it.</p>
→ bruegel.org</a></p>

4. Another country joins the euro</h3>
The Parliament voted to admit Bulgaria as the twenty-first member of the euro area from January 2026. The currency that was meant to converge its members continues, instead, to acquire them.</p>
→ epthinktank.eu</a></p>

5. Gas rules extended, with paperwork on the origin of every molecule</h3>
MEPs extended the gas-storage regulation to 2027 and required member states to track the Russian origin of their gas. The intention is sound; the result is yet more reporting for an energy sector already buried in it.</p>
→ epthinktank.eu</a></p>

6. Coming for the cheap parcels</h3>
The Parliament debated tougher enforcement against low-value imports and online sales, the cheap packages from outside the Union that Brussels finds so vexing. The customer who wanted a bargain is about to meet the Consumer Protection Cooperation Regulation.</p>
→ epthinktank.eu</a></p>

7. Extending its writ to Ukraine's phone bills</h3>
In July the Council agreed to fold Ukraine and Moldova into the EU roaming area from 2026. The Union expands, as ever, one regulation at a time, even before the membership paperwork is done.</p>
→ consilium.europa.eu</a></p>

8. The institutional turf war over foreign investment</h3>
Lawyers described the fight over the new foreign-investment screening rules as an institutional game of thrones, with Brussels trying to wrest control from the member states. Even the EU's own organs cannot agree who should hold the new powers.</p>
→ clearytradewatch.com</a></p>

9. A debate on preserving minority regions, in the abstract</h3>
The Parliament found time to debate a citizens' initiative on protecting the culture and language of ethnic-minority regions. Noble in principle, and a useful reminder that the chamber will debate almost anything except whether it does too much.</p>
→ epthinktank.eu</a></p>

Eurobloat #0182 • June 2025

hello@peterspath.net (Peter) — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 16:00:00 +0000

June was the month the rule factory abruptly decided that red tape was a menace, though only the red tape standing between the Union and €800 billion of new defence spending, while still finding time to lay down the law on the breeding of dogs and cats.</p>

Folly of the Month: red tape is terrible, says the body that makes it, when it wants tanks</h2>
On 17 June the Commission unveiled a Defence Readiness Omnibus to "simplify" rules and clear away the administrative hurdles slowing defence investment. The same institution that buries every farmer, factory and start-up in paperwork has discovered, the moment it wants to rearm, that paperwork is a terrible burden after all. Red tape, it turns out, is only ever a problem when it inconveniences Brussels.</p>
→ commission.europa.eu</a></p>

1. A turf war over who may veto your investments</h3>
On 11 June the Council pushed back on the new foreign-investment screening rules, resisting the Commission's attempt to pull the power up to Brussels. Even the Union's own organs cannot agree which of them should get to vet the continent's money.</p>
→ clearytradewatch.com</a></p>

2. Now harmonising the dog and the cat</h3>
On 19 June the Parliament adopted its position on the first EU-wide minimum standards for the breeding, housing, sale and traceability of dogs and cats, mandatory microchips and all. No corner of life, not even the basket by the fire, lies beyond the reach of a Brussels standard.</p>
→ europarl.europa.eu</a></p>

3. The finance rules it clamped down, now unclamped</h3>
The Commission proposed easing the securitisation framework it had bolted down after the last crisis. Lighter rules may well be sensible, but the whiplash, tighten hard and then quietly loosen, is the mark of an institution that regulates by mood rather than judgement.</p>
→ mayerbrown.com</a></p>

4. Scanning the deepfake, and your messages with it</h3>
On 17 June the Parliament adopted its position on the recast Child Sexual Abuse Directive, raising penalties and criminalising AI-generated abuse material. The cause could hardly be more sympathetic, which is precisely why it makes such a convenient battering ram for the wider campaign to reach inside every private message.</p>
→ europarl.europa.eu</a></p>

5. Extending the roaming writ to a non-member</h3>
On 17 June the Commission proposed folding Ukraine into the EU roaming area from 2026. The Union's rules now reach across borders it has not yet enlarged to include.</p>
→ enlargement.ec.europa.eu</a></p>

6. Harmonising the ballot box, too</h3>
On 24 June the Council adopted rules to standardise how mobile EU citizens, those living in another member state, vote and stand in European Parliament elections. Even the act of voting must now be brought into line with a common template.</p>
→ consilium.europa.eu</a></p>

7. Grading the homework of all twenty-seven</h3>
On 18 June the Parliament adopted its take on the Commission's 2024 rule-of-law report, sitting in judgement on prisons, media and rights across every member state. The Union that struggles to balance its own books appoints itself examiner of twenty-seven democracies.</p>
→ europarl.europa.eu</a></p>

8. Eight hundred billion, and rules bent to spend it</h3>
The defence drive sits within a ReArm Europe plan to mobilise up to €800 billion, with procurement and permitting rules loosened to move the money fast. When the cause is grand enough, the famous caution simply evaporates.</p>
→ defence-industry-space.ec.europa.eu</a></p>

9. A 90% target, loaded and ready</h3>
By month's end the Commission was poised to propose a binding 90% emissions cut for 2040, complete with the foreign carbon credits that make the figure survivable. The number is for the headlines; the credits are for the accountants.</p>
→ climate.ec.europa.eu</a></p>

Eurobloat #0181 • May 2025

hello@peterspath.net (Peter) — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 16:00:00 +0000

May was the month Brussels threw a party to celebrate luring a departed member back towards its orbit, and the headline prize, tellingly, was fish.</p>

Folly of the Month: a "reset" whose great trophy was twelve more years of British fish</h2>
On 19 May the EU and the United Kingdom held their first summit since Brexit and hailed a "new chapter". Strip away the warm words and the thing Brussels wanted most, and got, was access to British fishing waters locked in until 2038. An institution that presents twelve more years of someone else's fish as a triumph of statecraft tells you precisely where its priorities lie, and is the best advertisement for leaving that anyone could have written.</p>
→ oceans-and-fisheries.ec.europa.eu</a> → euronews.com</a></p>

1. Rule-taking without a vote</h3>
The agri-food side of the deal commits Britain to "dynamic alignment" with EU food rules and the jurisdiction of the EU court, with no say in either. This is the very arrangement Brexit was meant to end: obeying Brussels rules written by people you cannot remove.</p>
→ ukandeu.ac.uk</a></p>

2. Re-importing the carbon rulebook</h3>
The reset also points towards relinking the UK's emissions trading scheme to the EU's, quietly pulling British carbon policy back under Brussels gravity. The drift is always in one direction, and it is never outward.</p>
→ ukandeu.ac.uk</a></p>

3. Youth mobility, or free movement by another name</h3>
Both sides agreed to work towards a "youth experience scheme", which is freedom of movement wearing a lanyard and pretending not to be. The label changes; the ambition to erase the border does not.</p>
→ euronews.com</a></p>

4. A defence pact to draw Britain back in</h3>
The summit produced a UK-EU security and defence partnership, another thread tying the departed member back to the centre. Brussels cannot win the argument, so it settles for slowly reabsorbing the people who left.</p>
→ eeas.europa.eu</a></p>

5. The carbon border tax, "simplified" and enlarged</h3>
In its May plenary the Parliament backed simplifying and strengthening the carbon border tax, which is to say making it both easier to administer and harder to escape. Simplification that expands the reach of a levy is the most Brussels kind of simplification there is.</p>
→ epthinktank.eu</a></p>

6. Tariffs on farm goods, paid by your shopping</h3>
MEPs approved new tariffs on agricultural goods from Russia and Belarus. The geopolitics may be sound; the bill, as ever with EU trade gestures, lands on the European shopper.</p>
→ epthinktank.eu</a></p>

7. Repricing the budget upwards, again</h3>
The Parliament adopted a report on revamping the long-term budget around competitiveness, defence and the rest, code for a bigger pot. Whatever the heading, the recommended direction of the EU budget is always up.</p>
→ epthinktank.eu</a></p>

8. The plan to break the encryption keeping you safe</h3>
On 26 May, eighty-nine organisations, firms and security experts wrote to the Commission warning that its ProtectEU drive to grant "lawful access" to encrypted messages would weaken the very encryption that protects every European. Brussels calls smashing the locks on your private life a security strategy.</p>
→ statewatch.org</a></p>

9. The reset as patient reconquest</h3>
The whole exercise is best understood as Brussels gently winning back ground it lost at the ballot box, one alignment clause at a time. A union confident in its own appeal would not need to reel in the members who voted to leave.</p>
→ ukandeu.ac.uk</a></p>

Eurobloat #0180 • April 2025

hello@peterspath.net (Peter) — Fri, 30 May 2025 16:00:00 +0000

April opened with Brussels reviving its dream of reading everyone's encrypted messages, and closed having declared a trade war and surrendered it inside a day.</p>

Folly of the Month: the twenty-four-hour trade war</h2>
On 9 April, in high dudgeon at American tariffs, the EU approved almost €21 billion of retaliatory measures on soybeans, motorcycles, motor boats, orange juice and more. On 10 April it suspended them for ninety days. A bloc that musters its great collective might, brandishes it for a single news cycle and then quietly puts it away is not a superpower; it is a committee that lost its nerve before lunch the following day.</p>
→ euronews.com</a> → fortune.com</a></p>

1. ProtectEU, or the dream of the universal backdoor</h3>
On 1 April the Commission unveiled "ProtectEU", an internal security strategy that resurrects the old ambition of giving police a way into encrypted communications. The fond belief that you can build a backdoor only the good guys will ever use never dies in Brussels, however many cryptographers explain that you cannot.</p>
→ eucrim.eu</a></p>

2. Your private data, decrypted by 2030</h3>
The plan sets a course towards "lawful access" to encrypted data later this decade, which is a polite way of saying your private messages should not stay private if an official would like to read them. The target date is 2030; the principle should worry you today.</p>
→ regtechtimes.com</a></p>

3. Even the digital rights groups smell dystopia</h3>
European Digital Rights called ProtectEU a step towards a digital dystopian future. When the people who spend their lives reading EU security proposals reach for the word "dystopia", it is worth listening.</p>
→ edri.org</a></p>

4. The €21 billion list, frozen mid-air</h3>
The retaliation menu ran from poultry and motorcycles to orange juice and toilet paper, all suspended before a cent was collected. Threats you withdraw the next morning are not leverage; they are theatre.</p>
→ investing.com</a></p>

5. The "simpler rulebook" that is mostly recycled</h3>
On 28 April the Commission published its plan for a simpler, clearer rulebook, which analysts judged to be longstanding measures dressed up as new ideas. Cutting red tape is welcome; announcing it for the fourth time is just a press release.</p>
→ bruegel.org</a></p>

6. Seven hundred million for daring to design a phone</h3>
On 23 April the Commission fined Apple €500 million and Meta €200 million under the Digital Markets Act, the first penalties handed down under that law. The charge sheet was that Apple steers users where it pleases and that Meta offers a pay-or-consent choice Brussels dislikes. Fining American firms €700 million for how they arrange their own shops is not consumer protection; it is a tariff collected by lawyers.</p>
→ digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu</a></p>

7. A passport for your mattress</h3>
On 16 April the Commission published its first Ecodesign working plan, which will require digital product passports for textiles, furniture, mattresses, tyres and more, each item carrying a scannable file of approved data. When the union decides that a sofa needs paperwork to prove it exists, the appetite for regulating ordinary objects has plainly outrun any need for it.</p>
→ ec.europa.eu</a></p>

8. The one sensible idea, and even that is half-hearted</h3>
On 16 April the Commission proposed a first EU list of safe countries of origin, including Bangladesh, Colombia, Egypt, India, Kosovo, Morocco and Tunisia, so that hopeless asylum claims could be fast-tracked and returns made simpler. Letting nations send back those with no case is plain common sense; that it took Brussels this long, and still leaves national lists untouched, tells you how reluctantly it was conceded.</p>
→ euronews.com</a></p>

9. A security strategy that mistrusts the citizen first</h3>
For all its talk of crime and threats, ProtectEU's instinct is to treat every European's private life as evidence waiting to be unlocked. A union that began by guaranteeing freedoms now itemises the ones it would like the keys to.</p>
→ eucrim.eu</a></p>

Eurobloat #0179 • March 2025

hello@peterspath.net (Peter) — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 16:00:00 +0000

March was the month the famous fiscal discipline evaporated. Faced with a bill it actually wanted to pay, Brussels found that its rules, its courts and its caution could all be set aside with remarkable speed, and began eyeing the contents of your savings account besides.</p>

Folly of the Month: €800 billion, and the discipline that vanished on demand</h2>
On 4 March the Commission pitched its "ReArm Europe" plan to unlock up to €800 billion for defence, to be followed by formal measures on the 19th. For years Brussels lectured member states about deficits and rules; the instant it wanted to spend at scale, the rulebook turned to putty, the borrowing limits softened and the lawyers were sent to find a justification. Discipline that dissolves the moment it is inconvenient was never discipline at all.</p>
→ euronews.com</a></p>

1. Eyeing your savings</h3>
On 19 March came a "Savings and Investments Union", built on the complaint that €300 billion of Europeans' savings flows out of the EU each year. The unspoken ambition is to keep that money at home and steer it where Brussels prefers, which is one short step from deciding it knows better than you what to do with your own.</p>
→ euronews.com</a></p>

2. The emergency clause, abused for the occasion</h3>
To move fast, the Commission reached for Article 122 of the treaties, an emergency power that conveniently sidelines the Parliament. Using a fire exit because the front door has too many locks is precisely how powers meant for crises become everyday habits.</p>
→ socialistsanddemocrats.eu</a></p>

3. The €800 billion that is mostly not there</h3>
Look closely and the headline figure is largely loans, relaxed rules and hoped-for private money rather than cash on the table. Brussels has learned that a big round number makes a better announcement than an honest one.</p>
→ euronews.com</a></p>

4. The deficit rules, suspended for the right cause</h3>
The plan leans on letting member states bust their spending limits for defence, exempting up to 1.5% of GDP from the rules. The limits that were iron when a government wanted to fund its own priorities turn out to be optional when Brussels approves of the bill.</p>
→ bruegel.org</a></p>

5. A summit of grand conclusions</h3>
On 20 March the European Council issued sweeping conclusions on competitiveness, defence and migration. The communiqué was, as ever, magnificent; the delivery is another matter for another summit.</p>
→ consilium.europa.eu</a></p>

6. Repurposing the bank for weapons</h3>
The package would also bend the European Investment Bank's mandate towards defence, loosening the rules that had kept it away from weapons. When an institution wants something, every other institution is quietly redrawn to help it pay.</p>
→ en.wikipedia.org</a></p>

7. Stopping the clock on its own green paperwork</h3>
In the same season Brussels moved to "stop the clock" on its sustainability reporting rules, delaying the burden it had so recently imposed. Easing the load is welcome; the whiplash of clamp-down-then-climb-down is the mark of an institution that legislates first and thinks later.</p>
→ europarl.europa.eu</a></p>

8. The lawyers warn it may not even be legal</h3>
Constitutional scholars and the Parliament's own legal service cautioned that funding defence through that emergency clause could breach the treaties themselves. Building your flagship policy on a contested legal base is a fine way to hand the eventual bill, and the embarrassment, to the courts.</p>
→ socialistsanddemocrats.eu</a></p>

9. Defence as the new answer to everything</h3>
Having mislaid a sense of purpose, the project rediscovered one in spending vast sums it does not have on a plan it cannot quite cost. When in doubt, Brussels reaches for a bigger number and a longer acronym.</p>
→ defensenews.com</a></p>

Eurobloat #0178 • February 2025

hello@peterspath.net (Peter) — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 16:00:00 +0000

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.</p>

Folly of the Month: the bloc that cannot build a tech giant starts outlawing the technology</h2>
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.</p>
→ digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu</a></p>

1. Told off in Paris</h3>
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.</p>
→ euronews.com</a></p>

2. Told off again in Munich</h3>
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.</p>
→ en.wikipedia.org</a></p>

3. The great deregulation begins, behind closed doors</h3>
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.</p>
→ socialeurope.eu</a></p>

4. A "moral necessity", repealed within the year</h3>
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.</p>
→ fidh.org</a></p>

5. Climbing down under pressure, and calling it strategy</h3>
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.</p>
→ ecfr.eu</a></p>

6. An admission dressed as a strategy</h3>
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.</p>
→ corporateeurope.org</a></p>

7. The lobby that wants the red tape kept</h3>
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.</p>
→ corporateeurope.org</a></p>

8. Banning first, understanding later</h3>
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.</p>
→ digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu</a></p>

9. Strangling at home, begging for competitiveness abroad</h3>
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.</p>
→ euronews.com</a></p>

Eurobloat #0177 • January 2025

hello@peterspath.net (Peter) — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 16:00:00 +0000

January brought a confession dressed as a strategy. After years of insisting its rulebook was Europe's great gift to the world, Brussels published a "Competitiveness Compass" conceding that the rules are precisely what is holding Europe back, then promised to address it in some future package.</p>

Folly of the Month: needing a compass to find the exit from your own maze</h2>
On 29 January the Commission unveiled "A Competitiveness Compass for the EU", built on the discovery that the bloc has fallen badly behind America and China. Strip away the management-speak and it is an admission that decades of Brussels rules made European business uncompetitive. That the institution responsible needs a special "compass" to locate the way out of a maze it built itself is the whole tragedy in a single document.</p>
→ legalblogs.wolterskluwer.com</a></p>

1. A quarter of the paperwork, admitted to be pointless</h3>
The Compass promises to cut reporting burdens by at least 25 per cent. Welcome news, and also a confession that a quarter of what Brussels demanded was never worth demanding.</p>
→ legalblogs.wolterskluwer.com</a></p>

2. Even the insiders call it a U-turn</h3>
Brussels-watchers noted that the Compass marks an open pivot from rule-making to deregulation, an admission that the previous five years went too far. The direction is right; the lack of any contrition for the lost decade is striking.</p>
→ corporateeurope.org</a></p>

3. The lobby that wants the maze kept</h3>
Some 270 groups wrote demanding the simplification be dropped and the rules preserved in full. There is always a coalition in Brussels whose deepest conviction is that the paperwork must stay.</p>
→ corporateeurope.org</a></p>

4. A strategy whose main product is a future strategy</h3>
The Compass itself cuts nothing; it merely promises an "omnibus" in late February that might. Brussels has reached the stage of announcing the announcement of the reform.</p>
→ legalblogs.wolterskluwer.com</a></p>

5. Critics christen it the anti-competitiveness compass</h3>
It did not take long for the wits to rename the document, noting that an institution famous for throttling enterprise was unlikely to rediscover dynamism by writing another communication. The name fits.</p>
→ reason.com</a></p>

6. More single market, naturally</h3>
Among the cures on offer is "deepening" the single market, which in practice means more harmonisation decided centrally. The answer to too much Brussels remains, with iron consistency, more Brussels.</p>
→ commission.europa.eu</a></p>

7. Built on Draghi's gloomy verdict</h3>
The whole exercise leans on Mario Draghi's report warning that Europe is falling behind. When your flagship strategy is founded on an autopsy of your own competitiveness, optimism is hard to fake.</p>
→ commission.europa.eu</a></p>

8. Simplification by the people who complicated it</h3>
The reform of the rules is, as ever, entrusted to the very institution that wrote them. Asking the rule factory to design its own off-switch rarely ends with the lights going out.</p>
→ legalblogs.wolterskluwer.com</a></p>

9. A compass is not a course change</h3>
For all the talk of direction, January ended with the machine still pointing where it always points: towards more rules, more integration and one more strategy to fix the last one. Knowing which way is out is not the same as walking there.</p>
→ corporateeurope.org</a></p>

Eurobloat #0176 • December 2024

hello@peterspath.net (Peter) — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 16:00:00 +0000

December saw a new Commission take office on the thinnest mandate in its history and promptly busy itself with the truly pressing matters of European life: which plug you may use, a trade deal that turned the Union against itself, and a flagship law it had to switch off before switching on.</p>

Folly of the Month: the Union comes for your charger</h2>
From 28 December, EU rules made USB-C the mandatory charging port for phones, tablets, cameras, headphones and a long list of other gadgets. There is a certain grandeur to a continent-spanning project of nations deciding that its historic mission, this month, is to standardise the connector on the end of a cable. The proudest achievement Brussels could point to as the year closed was that your next charger will look like everyone else's.</p>
→ commission.europa.eu</a></p>

1. A charger frozen into law forever</h3>
Critics noted the obvious flaw: enshrine one connector in legislation and you have outlawed whatever better idea comes next. Brussels has mistaken a snapshot of 2024 technology for the end of history.</p>
→ reason.com</a></p>

2. A new Commission, the slimmest mandate ever</h3>
The "von der Leyen II" Commission took office on 1 December, confirmed in November by the narrowest majority any Commission has ever scraped together. A weaker centre, more beholden to the right, settled in for five more years.</p>
→ euronews.com</a></p>

3. A trade deal that turned the Union on itself</h3>
On 6 December von der Leyen clinched the Mercosur agreement with South America, and immediately set France, its farmers and a bloc of member states against Germany and Spain. A "single" market that erupts into open warfare the moment a deal is signed is single in name only.</p>
→ euronews.com</a></p>

4. Farmers in the streets, again</h3>
French and other farmers protested furiously, fearing the deal would undercut them with imports held to looser standards than Brussels imposes at home. The Union writes rules its own producers must obey, then signs away their market to those who need not.</p>
→ euronews.com</a></p>

5. The deforestation law, switched off before launch</h3>
Brussels agreed to delay its flagship deforestation regulation by a year, days before it was due to bite. A law that must be postponed to stop it causing chaos was, by definition, not ready to be a law.</p>
→ trade.ec.europa.eu</a></p>

6. The e-waste alibi</h3>
The charger mandate was sold as saving some 11,000 tonnes of e-waste a year, the tidy figure that justifies Brussels reaching into your gadget drawer. Whether a continent's parliaments should be legislating plug shapes at all was, naturally, not the question asked.</p>
→ commission.europa.eu</a></p>

7. Even the one-charger dream needs carve-outs</h3>
Laptops, it turned out, were exempted until 2026, so even the great unification of the cable arrives with an asterisk. The simplest of mandates cannot survive contact with reality intact.</p>
→ commission.europa.eu</a></p>

8. A bloc that cannot agree on a trade deal or a plug</h3>
Mercosur laid bare the unbridgeable split between the EU's free-traders and its protectionists. The project that markets itself as Europe speaking with one voice spent December unable to agree on almost anything except the charger.</p>
→ euronews.com</a></p>

9. Priorities, in miniature</h3>
A new executive, a fractured trade deal, an unworkable green law, and the headline win of the month was the connector on your phone. If you wanted a portrait of the project's sense of proportion, December painted it.</p>
→ reason.com</a></p>

Eurobloat #0175 • November 2024

hello@peterspath.net (Peter) — Fri, 27 Dec 2024 16:00:00 +0000

November was the month the Union installed its executive for the next five years, not through anything so vulgar as an election, but through five weeks of confirmation hearings, threats and trades that ended in the narrowest approval any Commission has ever managed.</p>

Folly of the Month: an executive nobody chose, confirmed by the slimmest majority ever</h2>
On 27 November the Parliament approved the "von der Leyen II" Commission with 370 votes, the feeblest endorsement a Commission has ever received, and well down on the 401 von der Leyen herself secured in July. The body that will write the rules for 450 million people was seated not by their votes but by a backroom bargain, and even that bargain could barely be struck. A government this remote from the governed would, anywhere else, be called a democratic problem.</p>
→ euronews.com</a></p>

1. Five weeks of grilling to seat the chosen</h3>
The Parliament spent 4 to 12 November interrogating twenty-six commissioners-designate, three hours each, in a ritual whose outcome was never really in doubt. The theatre of scrutiny is elaborate; the result is decided in the corridors.</p>
→ europarl.europa.eu</a></p>

2. Sink the whole college? The threat that bought concessions</h3>
Socialist MEPs threatened to vote down the entire Commission unless Italy's Raffaele Fitto, a Brothers of Italy man handed the cohesion and reforms brief, was stripped of his executive vice-presidency. Government by hostage-taking is an odd look for the self-styled home of European democracy.</p>
→ eunews.it</a></p>

3. Votes for portfolios, portfolios for votes</h3>
The big groups ran a "package" in which the whole college rose or fell together, the EPP holding out for Fitto while the Socialists were bought off with Ribera, and the deal was done on 20 November. The college was assembled the way a cabinet of cronies always is, by swapping jobs for support.</p>
→ eunews.it</a></p>

4. A mandate shrinking by the year</h3>
That 370-vote tally, down sharply from July and resting on a coalition propped up by more right-wing forces, points to a centre that weakens with every cycle. The project's legitimacy is not growing; it is quietly leaking away.</p>
→ euronews.com</a></p>

5. Six vice-presidents and a baroque new hierarchy</h3>
The new structure came complete with a half-dozen executive vice-presidents and overlapping fiefdoms. When in doubt, Brussels answers a problem with another layer of senior titles.</p>
→ en.wikipedia.org</a></p>

6. Scrutiny as ritual, not check</h3>
Analysts called it "all chill, no grill", and noted that the big groups had agreed before the process even began that every candidate would sail through. A confirmation process whose outcome is settled in advance is not holding anyone to account.</p>
→ ceps.eu</a></p>

7. Confirmed by a parliament few voters can name</h3>
The whole edifice rests on a Parliament that turned out barely half the electorate in June and whose members most Europeans could not identify. Remote power, confirmed by a remote chamber, is the project's enduring design flaw.</p>
→ europarl.europa.eu</a></p>

8. The far-right surge it was built to keep out</h3>
June's elections had sent a record hard-right contingent to Strasbourg, and November's deal-making was partly an exercise in managing that reality while pretending it away. Ignoring the voters is, increasingly, the centre's main occupation.</p>
→ journalofdemocracy.org</a></p>

9. First task: undo the last lot's rules</h3>
The freshly installed Commission, in office from 1 December, lined up a "Competitiveness Compass", complete with "omnibus" simplification, to unpick the very regulations its predecessor had piled on. Continuity, in Brussels, means the next team clearing up after the last.</p>
→ commission.europa.eu</a></p>

Eurobloat #0174 • October 2024

hello@peterspath.net (Peter) — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 16:00:00 +0000

October was the month the great free-trade project rediscovered protectionism, slapping heavy tariffs on the cheap electric cars Europeans actually want to buy, overruling its biggest member to do it, and somehow undercutting its own climate goals in the bargain.</p>

Folly of the Month: taxing the affordable electric car</h2>
On 4 October the Commission won a vote to impose definitive tariffs of up to around 45 per cent on Chinese electric vehicles, in force from the end of the month. The bloc that lectures the world about open markets and the green transition chose to make clean cars more expensive for its own citizens, picked a trade fight with Beijing, and split itself down the middle to do it. Protectionism dressed as an anti-subsidy measure is still protectionism, and the bill lands on the European driver.</p>
→ cnbc.com</a> → euronews.com</a></p>

1. A divided bloc, overruled into "unity"</h3>
The vote split ten in favour, five against and twelve abstaining, which is to say a clear majority of member states declined to back it. Brussels imposed the tariffs anyway, calling a result that commanded no real consensus a decision.</p>
→ euronews.com</a></p>

2. Germany said no, and was ignored</h3>
Germany, home to the Union's car industry, voted against, fearing for its exporters, and was simply overridden. When the largest economy's no counts for nothing, "ever closer union" starts to look like something else.</p>
→ euronews.com</a></p>

3. Dearer clean cars, courtesy of Brussels</h3>
The tariffs run as high as the mid-thirties of per cent for some makers, straight onto the price of an electric car. The citizen told to go green is now charged extra for doing so.</p>
→ euronews.com</a></p>

4. A trade war, with your dinner in the crossfire</h3>
Beijing lined up retaliation against EU brandy, pork and dairy. Brussels picks the fight; European farmers and distillers brace for the punch.</p>
→ atlanticcouncil.org</a></p>

5. The green paradox, scored own goal</h3>
Analysts pointed out that taxing the cheapest electric vehicles slows the very transition the EU claims is an existential priority. Two flagship goals, free trade and decarbonisation, sacrificed at once to protect incumbents.</p>
→ eurac.edu</a></p>

6. Anti-subsidy crusaders, generously subsidised</h3>
There is a particular cheek in a bloc that showers its own industries with state aid and green subsidies posing as the scourge of unfair support abroad. The rules against subsidy apply, as ever, to other people.</p>
→ euronews.com</a></p>

7. The deforestation law, delayed before it began</h3>
Also in October, Brussels proposed delaying its deforestation regulation by a year after partners warned they could not possibly comply in time. A flagship law unworkable on its own deadline is a flagship law that should never have set that deadline.</p>
→ lw.com</a></p>

8. The Commission, overriding the capitals</h3>
The episode showed the Commission pressing ahead despite the absence of a genuine member-state majority behind it. Power that needs no real consent is power that has stopped asking.</p>
→ euronews.com</a></p>

9. Free trade for me, tariffs for thee</h3>
A Union founded on the gospel of open markets spent October building walls around them. The principles are firm right up until an incumbent industry feels a draught.</p>
→ euronews.com</a></p>

Eurobloat #0173 • September 2024

hello@peterspath.net (Peter) — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 16:00:00 +0000

September handed the sceptics their case on a plate. The Union's own grandee delivered a report all but admitting that its rules have left Europe trailing, even as its court forced billions on a member state that did not want the money, and one of its own commissioners stormed out denouncing the leadership.</p>

Folly of the Month: when your own elder statesman says the rules are the problem</h2>
On 9 September Mario Draghi, former head of the European Central Bank, handed von der Leyen his report on European competitiveness, a sweeping confession that the EU has fallen badly behind the United States and China. Years of the Brussels rulebook, the very thing sold as Europe's edge, turn out to be a leading cause of its decline. The diagnosis is one this newsletter could have written; the cure Draghi prescribes, naturally, is hundreds of billions more in central spending and joint debt, because in Brussels the answer to too much Europe is always more Europe.</p>
→ commission.europa.eu</a></p>

1. €13 billion forced on an Ireland that refused it</h3>
On 10 September the EU's top court ordered Apple to pay Ireland some €13 billion in back taxes, in a case Ireland itself had fought for years because it did not want the money or the precedent. Overruling a member state's own tax sovereignty, against that state's wishes, is the project showing exactly who it thinks is in charge.</p>
→ euronews.com</a></p>

2. And €2.4 billion squeezed from Google the same day</h3>
Hours later the same court upheld a €2.4 billion fine on Google. Two enormous penalties on American firms in a single morning is the regulatory superpower doing the one thing it still does with confidence.</p>
→ rte.ie</a></p>

3. The cure is more of the disease</h3>
Draghi's headline remedy is roughly €800 billion a year in extra investment, much of it via common borrowing and central direction. The report rightly damns the over-regulation, then proposes to fix it with a great deal more centralised Brussels.</p>
→ commission.europa.eu</a></p>

4. A commissioner quits, denouncing the leadership</h3>
On 16 September the powerful internal market commissioner, Thierry Breton, resigned in a scathing letter accusing von der Leyen of "questionable governance" and backroom manoeuvring. When your own top officials walk out attacking how the place is run, the place is not well run.</p>
→ euronews.com</a></p>

5. Ireland's reluctant windfall</h3>
The spectacle of a country going to court to avoid receiving €13 billion tells you everything about the EU's appetite to override national choices. Brussels knows better than Dublin what Dublin should tax, and now Dublin must take the cheque.</p>
→ irishtimes.com</a></p>

6. The competitiveness gap, in black and white</h3>
Draghi laid out in detail how Europe has slipped behind on productivity, energy costs and technology, much of it self-inflicted through its own rules and prices. The report is most useful as a mirror, if only Brussels would look into it.</p>
→ commission.europa.eu</a></p>

7. Two record fines, one busy morning</h3>
Stacking the Apple and Google rulings into a single day, the EU reminded the world that its surest export is no longer products or standards but penalties on other people's companies. It is not a business model anyone should envy.</p>
→ rte.ie</a></p>

8. Governance by spat</h3>
Breton's exit, and the manoeuvring that prompted it, exposed a Commission run more by personal power plays than by any coherent plan. The new five-year term began, fittingly, with a resignation letter.</p>
→ euronews.com</a></p>

9. A report begging Europe to deregulate, written for the regulators</h3>
The deepest irony is that the case against the Brussels rulebook now comes from the heart of the establishment itself. The sceptics have been saying it for twenty years; it took a former central banker and a competitiveness crisis for Brussels to hear it, and it still has not acted.</p>
→ commission.europa.eu</a></p>

Eurobloat #0172 • August 2024

hello@peterspath.net (Peter) — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 16:00:00 +0000

August, traditionally the quiet month, produced one of the most revealing episodes of the year: a senior commissioner brandishing the EU's content law to threaten a foreign businessman over an interview that had not yet happened, on a platform hosted outside the Union, with a United States presidential candidate.</p>

Folly of the Month: threatening a livestream in America from a desk in Brussels</h2>
On 12 August the internal market commissioner, Thierry Breton, published a letter warning Elon Musk that his forthcoming live interview with Donald Trump could fall foul of the Digital Services Act, because whatever was said might affect "public security" in the EU. Reach far enough and that logic lets Brussels police any conversation anywhere on earth. A union that began as a common market now appoints itself referee of an American livestream, and calls it protecting Europeans.</p>
→ heise.de</a></p>

1. Even the Commission edged away</h3>
So awkward was the letter that the Commission itself declined to fully stand behind it, leaving Breton out on his limb. When your own institution will not defend your threat, the threat was a mistake.</p>
→ euronews.com</a></p>

2. Brussels, openly mocked</h3>
Musk replied with an unprintable line lifted from a Hollywood comedy, and much of the internet laughed along. Picking a censorship fight you then lose to a meme is not the conduct of a confident superpower.</p>
→ fortune.com</a></p>

3. Free-speech groups raise the alarm</h3>
A coalition of free-expression organisations called the letter an "alarming disregard for freedom of expression". When the people who defend speech for a living are alarmed, the speech police have overreached.</p>
→ futurefreespeech.org</a></p>

4. "Public order" as an all-purpose excuse</h3>
The episode showed how the DSA's elastic language lets Brussels treat almost any speech as a risk to be managed. A rule that can be stretched to cover anything is a rule that protects no one but the censor.</p>
→ heise.de</a></p>

5. Washington takes note</h3>
The United States Congress pressed the EU over what it saw as an attempt to censor political speech on X. The Union's content rules are fast becoming a transatlantic grievance rather than a model anyone wishes to copy.</p>
→ judiciary.house.gov</a></p>

6. The AI Act starts its clock</h3>
On 1 August the AI Act formally entered into force, beginning the countdown on a regime industry had begged Brussels to slow down. The continent that cannot grow a tech champion pressed start on the rules to bind one.</p>
→ commission.europa.eu</a></p>

7. A commissioner freelancing threats in the Union's name</h3>
Breton's letter was very much his own production, fired off with the swagger of a man who mistakes his portfolio for a pulpit. Personal vanity, dressed as European law, is a poor way to govern.</p>
→ euronews.com</a></p>

8. The reflex to threaten first</h3>
What the affair exposed was the instinct beneath the rulebook: when in doubt, warn, menace and reach for the law. A confident democracy argues with speech it dislikes; Brussels reaches for a letterhead.</p>
→ futurefreespeech.org</a></p>

9. The censor's law, working as designed</h3>
For all the embarrassment, the DSA functioned exactly as critics warned it would, as a lever to lean on platforms over lawful speech. The scandal is not that Breton misused it; it is that the tool exists to be used this way at all.</p>
→ heise.de</a></p>

Eurobloat #0171 • July 2024

hello@peterspath.net (Peter) — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 16:00:00 +0000

July offered a perfect miniature of the project: while it fumbled the serious questions of war and leadership, its most tangible achievement, the one that actually reached every citizen, was a redesigned bottle cap that pours your drink down your shirt.</p>

Folly of the Month: the cap that spills your drink, by decree</h2>
From 3 July, under the Single-Use Plastics Directive, every plastic bottle cap sold in the EU had to remain tethered to the bottle. Across the continent, citizens discovered their drinks now dribbling over their hands and chins, courtesy of a rule devised in Brussels to combat litter. Of all the things a union of nations might achieve, the one that touched every European this month was making it slightly harder to drink from a bottle. The micro-mandate is the macro-philosophy: no detail of daily life is too small to improve by force.</p>
→ euronews.com</a></p>

1. A directive for the end of your bottle</h3>
The tethered-cap rule, years in the making, applies to bottles up to three litres across the bloc, under Single-Use Plastics Directive 2019/904. Somewhere a great deal of official effort went into the geometry of a cap, and it shows.</p>
→ intravis.com</a></p>

2. The executive renewed without a public vote</h3>
On 18 July the Parliament re-elected Ursula von der Leyen as Commission president with 401 votes. The most powerful office in Europe was handed out, once again, in a secret ballot of insiders that no citizen took part in.</p>
→ europarl.europa.eu</a></p>

3. The rotating presidency goes rogue</h3>
Hungary took over the rotating presidency on 1 July, and within days Viktor Orbán flew to Moscow to meet Putin on a self-styled "peace mission". The system that hands the Council's chair around like a parcel discovered it had handed it to someone with his own foreign policy.</p>
→ internationalaffairs.org.au</a></p>

4. The Union boycotts its own chair</h3>
Furious, von der Leyen branded the trip an "appeasement mission" and ordered commissioners to snub meetings in Budapest. A bloc reduced to boycotting the country currently chairing it is a bloc at war with its own machinery.</p>
→ internationalaffairs.org.au</a></p>

5. Freelance diplomacy, Budapest edition</h3>
Orbán followed Moscow with trips to Beijing and to Trump in Florida, conducting his own grand tour in the Union's name. The rotating presidency was never meant to be a personal world tour, but the rules assumed everyone would behave.</p>
→ internationalaffairs.org.au</a></p>

6. The AI Act hits the statute book</h3>
On 12 July the AI Act was published in the Official Journal, setting the clock running on the rules industry had pleaded for time to absorb. Brussels does not let a competitiveness crisis interrupt its legislating.</p>
→ artificialintelligenceact.eu</a></p>

7. Litter as the pretext for redesigning your life</h3>
The cap rule was justified as a strike against beach litter, the familiar formula by which a real problem licenses an absurd intervention. The sea is not noticeably cleaner; your sleeve is noticeably wetter.</p>
→ euronews.com</a></p>

8. Grand strategy, fumbled; bottle caps, mastered</h3>
Set the spectacle side by side: a presidency in open revolt, a war on the doorstep, and the EU's surest, most universal act of the month was reattaching a cap. The project regulates the trivial with confidence and the serious with paralysis.</p>
→ europarl.europa.eu</a></p>

9. The cap as the perfect emblem</h3>
No single rule has done more to make the EU tangible, and faintly ridiculous, to ordinary people than the tethered cap. It is the whole philosophy in a thimble: harmless intentions, universal reach, and a small daily indignity nobody asked for.</p>
→ intravis.com</a></p>

Eurobloat #0170 • June 2024

hello@peterspath.net (Peter) — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 16:00:00 +0000

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.</p>

Folly of the Month: the message-scanning law too toxic to face a vote</h2>
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.</p>
→ patrick-breyer.de</a></p>

1. Killed again, certain to return</h3>
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.</p>
→ brusselstimes.com</a></p>

2. The voters deliver a rebuke</h3>
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.</p>
→ en.wikipedia.org</a></p>

3. The vote that blew up France</h3>
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.</p>
→ pbs.org</a></p>

4. The centre's response: change nothing</h3>
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.</p>
→ journalofdemocracy.org</a></p>

5. Apple, first into the dock under the DMA</h3>
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.</p>
→ digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu</a></p>

6. Wagging the finger at the capitals</h3>
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.</p>
→ brusselssignal.eu</a></p>

7. Scanning, dressed up as child protection</h3>
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.</p>
→ patrick-breyer.de</a></p>

8. A bloc deaf to its own electorate</h3>
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.</p>
→ journalofdemocracy.org</a></p>

9. The surveillance reflex, only resting</h3>
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.</p>
→ brusselstimes.com</a></p>

Eurobloat #0169 • May 2024

hello@peterspath.net (Peter) — Fri, 28 Jun 2024 16:00:00 +0000

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.</p>

Folly of the Month: The world's first AI rulebook, written by the people who brought you the tethered bottle cap</h2>
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.</p>
→ consilium.europa.eu</a></p>

1. Pay twenty thousand euros per migrant you will not take</h3>
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.</p>
→ consilium.europa.eu</a></p>

2. The interest on money that is not theirs</h3>
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.</p>
→ consilium.europa.eu</a></p>

3. Policing the planet's supply chains from a desk in Brussels</h3>
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.</p>
→ consilium.europa.eu</a></p>

4. A directive to make Brussels build a repair website</h3>
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.</p>
→ consilium.europa.eu</a></p>

5. After seven years, the schoolmaster runs out of detentions</h3>
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.</p>
→ euronews.com</a></p>

6. Brussels appoints itself editor of Facebook</h3>
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.</p>
→ ec.europa.eu</a></p>

7. The Commission bans a phone app for being too fun</h3>
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.</p>
→ digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu</a></p>

8. The late-payment cure that small firms begged Brussels to drop</h3>
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.</p>
→ gtreview.com</a></p>

9. The nature law nobody could pass, blocked by the countries that have to live with it</h3>
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.</p>
→ arc2020.eu</a></p>

Eurobloat #0168 • April 2024

hello@peterspath.net (Peter) — Fri, 31 May 2024 16:00:00 +0000

April was the last full plenary before June's elections, so the outgoing class of MEPs cleared its desk by passing nearly everything it had not yet got round to. The result was a single month of migration deals, repair sermons, banned shampoo miniatures and a brand new cap on your own cash.</p>

Folly of the Month: A migration pact that relocates everyone but the problem</h2>
On 10 April the Parliament finally adopted the New Pact on Migration and Asylum in a flurry of ten separate votes, the centrepiece of which is a "solidarity mechanism" obliging member states to take in relocated arrivals or pay into a central pot to be excused. After years of failing to control its own external border, Brussels has decided the answer is not fewer arrivals but a fairer way of sharing them out among capitals, several of which have already said they will not comply. The same package authorises taking facial images and fingerprints from children as young as six, which is the sort of detail that tends to get lost behind the word "solidarity". A border the EU cannot defend, dressed up as a quota the EU cannot enforce.</p>
→ europarl.europa.eu</a></p>

1. The €10,000 cash cap, with a new authority to watch you spend it</h3>
On 24 April the Parliament approved the anti-money-laundering package, complete with an EU-wide ceiling on cash payments and a shiny new central agency, AMLA, to be installed in Frankfurt. Nothing says trust in the citizen quite like deciding from Brussels how much of your own money you may hand over in person.</p>
→ europarl.europa.eu</a></p>

2. The right to repair, now compulsory and lectured</h3>
On 23 April MEPs adopted the "right to repair" directive by 584 votes to 3, instructing manufacturers how they must mend your kettle and nudging you to feel virtuous about keeping it. A genuinely useful idea would not need a directive, a digital form and a Brussels press release to tell you that fixing things is good.</p>
→ europarl.europa.eu</a></p>

3. The packaging regulation comes for your hotel shampoo</h3>
On 24 April the Parliament signed off the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, which among much else bans the little shampoo and body-lotion bottles in hotel bathrooms and the single portions of sauce in restaurants. The continent that cannot guard a border has at least settled the great question of the miniature ketchup sachet.</p>
→ europarl.europa.eu</a></p>

4. Brussels decides who is your boss</h3>
Also on 24 April the Parliament backed the Platform Workers Directive, under which an EU-wide "presumption of employment" will reclassify delivery riders and drivers across twenty-seven different labour markets. Quite how a single Brussels rule improves on the national courts that already handle this is left, as ever, to the imagination.</p>
→ eunews.it</a></p>

5. The Ecodesign passport for your trousers</h3>
The same plenary adopted the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, which extends design rules across almost every product and bolts on a mandatory "Digital Product Passport". Soon your shirt will carry more paperwork than a returning Brexit lorry, and Brussels will call this simplification.</p>
→ eunews.it</a></p>

6. Your medical records, pooled at the centre</h3>
On 24 April MEPs adopted the European Health Data Space by 445 votes to 142, creating a Union-wide system for sharing patient files and, for research, your data whether you asked or not. The body that frets endlessly about Big Tech holding your information has decided the safe place for it is a pan-European database run by itself.</p>
→ europarl.europa.eu</a></p>

7. Due diligence for the whole planet, billed to your suppliers</h3>
On 24 April the Parliament passed the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, 374 to 235, requiring large firms to police human rights and the environment up and down their entire global supply chains. A compliance industry is hereby created by statute, and member states are given two years to work out who pays for it.</p>
→ europarl.europa.eu</a></p>

8. Central planning, rebranded as a Net-Zero Industry Act</h3>
On 25 April MEPs approved the Net-Zero Industry Act, which sets a Brussels target for the share of green technology to be manufactured inside the Union and hands out streamlined permits to the favoured sectors. The last time Europe tried to plan which industries would flourish from the centre, the results were not encouraging.</p>
→ europarl.europa.eu</a></p>

9. Post-Qatargate, an ethics body with no power to investigate</h3>
In the spring the EU institutions finally agreed to set up an "Interinstitutional Body for Ethical Standards", their long-trailed answer to the Qatargate cash-and-corruption scandal. It may draft common standards and politely monitor compliance, but it may not investigate anyone, which is roughly the watchdog you design when you do not want to be watched.</p>
→ transparency.eu</a></p>