The EU is suffering from a lawyer-industrial complex. Too much compliance work is busywork without a genuine impact or advantage.

The clearest example is the Digital Services Act. The EU Commission has investigated Meta, TikTok and a bunch of porn sites for non-compliance with the DSA.  The preliminary findings concluded in 2026 that each of the platforms did not comply with relevant child protection provisions in the DSA. Yet, after so much effort, nothing has changed. Children can still access the platforms, and no one is happier, except for lawyers.

On a fundamental level, the EU’s digital laws cannot deal with bad actors. The enforcement mechanisms in the laws are weak. Or rather, the mechanisms are enforced weakly. The EU Commission are drowning digital platforms in paperwork and expecting them to do the right thing, but they won’t. Meta, TikTok and porn sites fundamentally do not subscribe to EU’s values and try to circumvent them and fake compliance any way they can. What then?

There are clear political boundaries on what the EU Commission can do. It can ask platforms nicely to fill out paperwork, but it may evoke “daddy Trump’s” anger - which the Secretary General of NATO, Mark Rutte, literally calls him (no joke) – if the demands become too harsh or the fines become more than insignificant. Sadly, the EU has to wake up to the fact that we no longer live in a world where soft power is very influential.