Brussels, the city that exists solely to prove that if you give enough bureaucrats enough coffee and taxpayer money, they will eventually produce a document that satisfies no one and solves nothing, has finally birthed its latest stillborn miracle: the Digital Networks Act. It is a title that sounds like it was generated by an AI that was programmed to be as boring and non-threatening as possible, which is fitting for a European Commission that treats 'innovation' as a terrifying ghost that must be exorcised with a thousand-page manual of red tape. This new master plan is supposedly aimed at 'modernizing' the EU’s telecommunications sector, which is a polite way of saying that the continent’s digital infrastructure is currently held together by damp string and the fading memories of 1990s optimism.

The core of this legislative masturbation is the drive to speed up fiber-optic rollout and reduce reliance on foreign technology. This is the classic European paradox: we hate the Americans and the Chinese for being better at tech than we are, so our solution is to write a law that makes it even harder for anyone to actually build anything. The Commission, led by the usual collection of career politicians whose only experience with 'the cloud' is looking out the window of a private jet, wants to create a 'level playing field.' In the world of EU regulation, a level playing field usually means everyone is buried up to their necks in the same amount of dirt so that no one can run ahead and make the others look bad.

Naturally, the industry is 'divided.' This is the corporate equivalent of saying a pack of hyenas is 'divided' over who gets the largest chunk of a rotting zebra. On one side, we have the legacy telecom giants—the fiber-optic fossils who have spent decades overcharging users for sub-par speeds while complaining that they are the real victims here. They want what they call a 'fair share' contribution from Big Tech. They believe that companies like Google and Netflix, who actually provide the content people want to watch, should pay the telcos for the privilege of using the pipes the telcos were already paid by the consumers to build. It’s a protection racket that would make a 1920s mob boss blush, but in Brussels, it’s called 'forward-thinking policy.'

On the other side, we have the tech giants, who are rightfully annoyed that they are being asked to subsidize the incompetence of European infrastructure companies. Of course, they aren't the good guys either. They are predatory data-vampires who would sell your grandmother’s search history for a nickel. They argue that this tax—excuse me, 'funding mechanism'—would violate net neutrality and probably cause the sky to fall. Both sides are lying, both sides are greedy, and both sides treat the actual citizens of Europe as nothing more than walking wallets that occasionally vote for the wrong person.

The Commission’s plan also hints at easing merger rules, which is the ultimate surrender to the reality that European companies are too small and too weak to compete globally. The dream of a 'Single Market' for telecoms is a beautiful fantasy, right up there with the idea that someone actually enjoys eating boiled cabbage. To achieve it, the EU would have to strip away the nationalistic protectionism that every member state clings to like a security blanket. But instead of doing the hard work of actual integration, they offer this Digital Networks Act—a nebulous collection of 'consultations' and 'future possibilities' that promises everything and guarantees nothing.

Let’s be honest about the 'reducing reliance on foreign tech' bit. It’s a pathetic admission of defeat. Europe doesn't have a Google. It doesn't have a Huawei. It doesn't even have a decent version of TikTok to rot its teenagers' brains. All it has is a regulatory regime that is world-class at stopping things from happening. By the time this act is actually implemented, 'fiber' will probably be as obsolete as the telegraph, and we’ll all be communicating via telepathic chips manufactured in Shenzhen while the European Commission is still debating the proper font size for the mandatory 'cookies' warning on our brain-links.

This is the state of the EU in the 2020s: a bureaucratic machine that thinks it can win the future by managing the decline of the present. They call it reform; I call it a funeral arrangement for a digital sector that never really lived. The industry is divided because they are fighting over the scraps of a shrinking pie, while the people in charge are busy polishing the silverware on a sinking ship. If this is the plan to save European tech, then we should all start learning how to send smoke signals. At least the wood for the fire won’t require a 27-country consensus and a digital network funding consultation period.