The European Union, the Middle East, the former USSR and part of North Africa
This April Fools Day, the European Union has fined itself for failing to comply with the terms and conditions of the Digital Markets Act.
“Opening up unfettered markets for the benefit of outsiders” wrote the EU in its decision, “is essential for anyone who has created a platform that has become commercially successful.”
From its offices in Stockholm, a music streaming source close to people familiar with the matter added that “opening up unfettered markets for the benefit of outsiders is particularly important for EU companies that have not been able to create a platform that has become commercially successful.”
How the EU runs afoul of its DMA
The EU’s DMA has found the EU itself guilty of creating a monopoly in the supply and distribution of EU digital passports.
In particular, the EU has charged itself with erecting obstacles to an open digital market for unfettered and freely available passports in the name of security and in order to control fraud, as well as other illegal or predatory behaviors.
The EU is subsequently requiring the EU, under the DMA, to allow foreign nationals to apply for and obtain EU digital passports, which must also be liberally downloadable off the internet and via AirDrop.
In response, the EU maintained in its defense that it is trying to comply with the DMA, but that it is asking foreigners who demand an EU passport under the DMA to pay a reasonable tax of one half Euro per person, to cover the costs of maintaining and enforcing secure borders in the EU.
In response, EU leadership issued a press release stating it was outraged and flabbergasted that any entity — particularly the very EU that it just fined — would disregard the spirit and intent of its DMA, which was to clearly to erase the EU’s ability to maintain and secure its borders, and to figure out how to do this at its own expense.
EU seeks to open up Protected Geographical Indications
The EU is also leveraging the spirit and intent of its hypothetically groundbreaking and intentionally platform-eroding new DMA law to begin investigating France’s Champagne region for effectively monopolizing “Champagne.”
The Champaign region is suspected of attempting to erect Walled Gardens and Secured Cellars, both of which are expected to violate the principles of the imagined goal of the DMA, which is to blow down doors and open up windows so that nobody owns anything they have created.
One beneficiary of this investigation may be the EU’s Spotify, which wishes to sell its sparkling streaming service under the name of Champagne, because the company is not able to make sufficient profits selling subscriptions of its streaming sparking service without the Champagne moniker.
The EU is also expanding its DMA enforcement efforts into an investigation of Italy’s Parmigiano Reggiano, Spain’s Jamon Iberico, Ireland’s Tax Evasion, and the newly protected world heritage designation of Germany’s Berlin Techno scene.
“We believe it is both fair and indeed essential that Berlin should be allowing everyone into Berghain,” the EU stated on 1 April, adding, “it appears all of Berlin’s Techno clubs should probably also be playing some American Country, R&B, Jazz, and Honky-tonk, as well as K-Pop, Bossa Nova and Mbaqanga.”
Berlin’s vibrant and iconic Techno scene draws is origins from Black American music influencers in Detroit, where Disco, Funk, and House launched a new genre in the 1970s within America’s rusting ruins of the post-industrial capital of cars. Techno as a genre was subsequently embraced in the parallel rusting post-industrial Cold War wasteland of Berlin in the 1980 and 1990s.
The EU had no comment on whether Berlin’s white embrace of Detroit’s music genre should be acknowledged or even addressed. It told reporters the real victim here was the white billionaires of the EU who can’t make money without leveraging American and African art and technology for free.
“We are not racist,” the EU said in a statement. “Nor are we merely a regional trade favoritism agency with unlimited taxation and punitive cash grabbing powers seeking to maintain the commercial relevance of the Earth’s [ostensibly] once-great colonial empires, the remaining economic holdings of the robber baron elite, and various archaic royal families and random statelets that are critically important to preserve at any cost. We also have no comment on Airbus.”
Separately, the EU said it is also inquiring about the price of tea in China.
Editor’s note: This is very clearly parody of the EU’s Digital Markets Act and its uneven application. It is also the only April Fools piece we will run
