81k UK-owned .eu domains suspended as Brexit transition ends

They cancelled .eu domains for all registrants who reside in the UK, irrespective of their citizenship. That is not a speculation. They ask for those people to prove their citizenship before the end of March. Why doesn't the EU first ask for the citizenship proof before harming its own citizen? It's kind of dumb to think that the EU happily harms its own citizen and don't even realise it because they think the only harm UK folks.

Like GDPR? Try reading it.

Yeah yeah, the UK influenced the EU so heavily it ended up choosing to leave.

I've already explained one way in which the EU is basically oriented towards the needs of France and Germany - the single market for services never really happened. It was promised and that promise was never fulfilled. Why? Because Germany and France don't export many services.

Even selling of goods and services online only started to be paid attention in 2015, decades after the single market for goods, and the EU has mostly made things worse for online sellers via things like its VAT rules, which are horrifically complex to implement. Basically you can't do it because it's so complex, so you have to get a dedicated third party company to process the VAT stuff for you, which imposes costs on everyone.

Meanwhile the only thing that came out of their supposed digital services market strategy was a highly controversial change to copyright law, the product of vast amounts of lobbying. In Germany it was so controversial it even led to a bomb threat!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_on_Copyright_in_the_...

Things that could actually make it easier to sell the sorts of services that the UK is strong in never even made it to the table. Instead there is a very vague set of general statements in the treaties that don't mean anything, leading to lots of very silly court cases, like when someone selling a laser tag game in Germany bought laser guns from the UK and residents took them to the EU courts, arguing that "human dignity" meant that this service should be restricted. And the courts agreed.

Really, who has time for this kind of stuff? The EU has time to standardise banana straightness (read my other post) and kettle power levels, but the basics of "can I open an entertainment business in another country without being shut down by bizarre legal arguments" isn't there.

Ut ameris, amabilis esto.

>Combined with UK media making stuff up about the EU (bendy bananas).

Not just the media but the Prime Minister himself. He even gave a speech where he admitted to making up a story about the EU wanting to ban prawn cocktail crisps.

Of course, he did also get fired from his job as a journalist for blatantly lying.

But where have you looked? To pick just one example, Brexit the Movie talked about the low quality of EU bureaucracy quite a bit.

The EU's old list of "myths" is a bit of a joke BTW. A lot of the so-called myth debunkings started with an admission that the claim is indeed true, but here's why it's actually OK. It's more a list of responses than myths. For instance the "myth" that they were funding trapeze artists in Africa was explained with words to the effect of, yes we do this, but it's totally cool so what's the problem? I've noticed hardly anyone who quotes the existence of that site seems to have actually read any of it. I think they took it down at some point - it was as embarrassing to the EU as the British press, really. Kind of a hall of shame of stupid stuff the press had picked up on over the years combined with a very weak set of justifications, often of the form of "we decided to do this so that makes it right".

Bendy bananas is a good example of that by the way. You claim the press made it up. You're lying, perhaps without realising it. Commission regulation 2257/94 specifies different classes for fruit based on, amongst other things, straightness. Read about it here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_Regulation_(EC)_No....

This is supposedly to make trade easier. Perhaps it does, although why the EU needs to define this vs just supermarkets and other bulk purchasers who care about banana straightness is very unclear. The debate about bendy bananas was never about whether the rules existed at all, but rather whether they represented a reasonable deployment of trans-national bureaucracy.

Your post is symptomatic of a more general problem: people who are very pro EU tend to believe they are better informed than they actually are, and tend to believe people who disagree with them about the value of the EU are just brainwashed idiots who don't know the facts. But when this has been tested rigorously e.g. in polls or studies, it's always been that anti-EU people have a (slightly) better grip on the facts.