I imagine we’ll see more ham-fisted attempts from the EU to regulate the internet in the immediate future.
If people like her had been more active even earlier in the internet space (think 2008-2010) maybe we wouldn't have had to deal with the current FANG oligopoly. I personally used to work for a local business directory whose data was almost instantly copied and used by the recently launched back then Google Places. There was no recourse for a company like ours back then (other then keeping our fingers crossed for the likes of Yelp in their fight against Google, which goes to say how helpless we were), so the fact that a person like Vestager now exists and has so much power to control this sort of bad behavior is all for the best.
Yes, nobody cares. Clearly, you've never heard about Brexit. Europe and immigration might have played a little role in that debate.
Or the rise of populism in Germany, France, the Netherlands and other countries.
Immigration is obviously such a non-issue that the AfD or the Front National (don't know the current name off the top of my head - they renamed) have absolutely capsized in recent elections.
Depends a lot on how you ask the question. The pro-EU governments are working to turn EU into a superstate. The great majority of people don’t want that.
But thanks to the big visible benefits, like not having to change money, show your passport and pay roaming fees when going on vacation, most people still have a generally favorable opinion of EU, that lets them get away with their vision of the "ever closer union", despite the lack of democratic support of it.
It’s a common problem of indirect democracy. People really care about issue A and B, and elect politicians that align with them on those issues. Those politicians then have a free hand to go against the will of the people on everything else, leading to lots and lots of things happening without a democratic mandate.
If you only get one vote every 4-5 years, it’s almost impossible to make that vote count for all the decisions that’ll need to be made in between.
Please show evidence of that statement. I'm not seeing anyone really pushing for federalism, in fact quite the opposite, holding the current group of countries model but with stronger ECB (bank) and ECJ (court) to prevent failures like Greece and Spain had.
Some slight moves to harmonize trade laws have happened, but not a lot. Some more in banking laws.
Guess how much time they spent discussing that the EU was just rejected completely by the biggest vote in British history: none whatsoever.
The EU isn't even federalising, really. It's just centralising. That's happening despite the fact that very few want it because they aren't allowed to disagree.
New treaties aren't being signed, but that doesn't matter: the existing treaty is self amending and anyway, the ECJ can be relied on to always re-interpret the treaties to grant the EU new powers it was explicitly not meant to have. The Kafkaesque way they decided that state aid rules allowed the EU to control corporate tax rates is an example of that: the Commission was never given that power, explicitly and by design, but they took it anyway. With a corrupt Supreme Court ideologically devoted to increasing executive power, treaties and laws don't mean anything.
So I'd argue if you can't see it happening you're not paying attention.
The Brexit vote was on 2016-6-23. The next EU Council meeting was on 2016-6-28. According to the minutes [1] and conclusios the Council discussed the Syrian refugee crisis, economics, external relations and the Brexit vote. No EU army was discussed, the only defence-related thing was EU-NATO cooperation.
* [1] http://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-27-2016-INIT... * [2] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/media/21645/28-euco-conclusi...
> Guess how much time they spent discussing that the EU was just rejected completely by the biggest vote in British history: none whatsoever.
Immediately after this Council meeting the EU27 (all member states sans the UK) met in an informal meeting whose whole topics were of course Brexit and the state of the European Union.
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/media/20462/sn00060-en16.pdf
The meeting I'm referring to is this one
https://amp.dw.com/en/uk-will-oppose-any-idea-of-eu-army-des...
In the years since the vote I haven't seen the EU agree on any changes triggered by the vote or even really discuss why it happened. From the agendas of their meetings you could think it'd never happened at all.
Surely you're kidding? The EU historically has terrible problems in transparency, effective communication of policies and general reputation problems because of the distance between it and its citizens. They have terrible marketing, famously so.
Even if this is a bad faith argument - and it's fine if it is - that only serves to illustrate the EU's 'marketing' is not effective.
All of these can be found in EU, the same regulatory capture, retarded copyright laws pushed by media industry, blatant nepotism (German officials lobbying for Gazprom, Deutsche Bank bribing Russian officials buying deals by giving good positions to Russian officials' children while evading taxes) etc.
The only difference is that IT is a scorched field in EU, so no regulatory capture in this domain.
Parliament will hold hearings over the next month to scrutinise the Commissioner Designates and will then hold a vote to approve the entire college of Commissioners.
And this process has, actually, resulted in unsuitable candidates being either replaced entirely or portfolios being redistributed in the past (including the last time around in 2014).
Parliament can also sack the Commission at any time if it so desires. That last happened to the Santer Commission in 1999.
This is more democratic legitimation than most ministers in most state governments have, where ministers are often appointed by the head of government without confirmation. (The EU commission is similar to a government and commissioners are similar to ministers in their role)
Look at how the head of the Commission was chosen. Remember, the entire Commission reports to one person. The sub-Commissioners are theoretically (by treaty) nominated by each country but in practice the head of the Commission controls all the appointments. As Jean-Claude Juncker openly admitted, if he didn't like an appointment he'd simply reject it. He isn't meant to have this power, but claims he does and I believe him. The EU is full of things like that.
So the entire Commission reports to von der Leyen. How did this woman get the job? Nobody can tell you. The decision was made in secret. No minutes of those meetings were published. No leader justified the decision. If there was a vote at all, nobody can see which countries voted for her or why. It just ... happened. Literally the only statement I've seen about what criteria was used was, "it'd be great if this time we had a woman", which came from some EU President (there are several and I forgot which one). So I guess that must have been why she got the job.
Theoretically the Parliament can pick the head of the Commission. When they picked Juncker last time around, the EU went along with it and liked to claim it was getting more democratic as a result. But this time, when MEPs committed the hopelessly un-woke crime of nominating a man, their nomination was ignored.
In true Soviet style, the EU Parliament got a vote ... but because MEPs didn't want the terminally incompetent von der Leyen, it had to be fixed. No problem - MEPs were presented with a vote in which von der Leyen was the only candidate they could vote for!
Despite her being literally the only candidate on the voting paper, so many abstained from this farce she still got the lowest number of votes in history.
So that's the EU. There are votes, there are politicians, there's a Parliament. Just that none of them matter.
But it gets worse: Ursula v.d. Leyen has a history of trying to implement countrywide internet cencorship in Germany (and is since called "Zensursula"). And could only be stopped because of a gigantic rise of the Pirate Party (now defunct) to levels that became dangerous to the establishment.
The Spitzenkandidat system isn't law per se - it's a (very new) convention mostly being pushed by the European Parliament. The European Council (that is, the presidents, prime ministers and chancellors of each EU country) has always had to give or withhold an endorsement to whoever the European Parliament proposed to lead the European Commission.
Trump is incompetent and corrupt.