#ThanksEU
"The EU made Apple adopt new Wi-Fi standards, and now Android can support AirDrop"
#Increase, a transnational project to share seeds, increase biodiversity as citizen science. You get seeds, grow produce, share observations and share the next generation of seeds with more people. Financed also by the EU Horizon programme.
The data your connected devices collect is yours.
"This Regulation ensures that users of a connected product or related service in the Union can access, in a timely manner, the data generated by the use of that connected product or related service and that those users can use the data, including by sharing them with third parties of their choice"
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=OJ:L_202302854&qid=1757595472752
More context: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/data-act
€2.95B fine from the @EUCommission against Google. While their spindoctors tried to push the message that Europe will bow before Trump with regard to Big Tech in the past few days (and many news outlets happily ran that biased story).
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/statement_25_2034
Did you know? If you have data that you want to share as a citable source, you need a DOI (Digital Object Identifier). One provider of DOIs is https://zenodo.org/ a project funded by CERN, OpenAIRE and the European Union. Register, add your data and get a DOI! It has Github integration, so you can just point it to a Github repo and whenever you add a release on Github, you get a DOI :) I will try to get the same functionality in codeberg/Forgejo.
Example: https://zenodo.org/records/16903106
You know how you often hear that the EU is hurting US tech companies a lot and in unfair ways?
Well.
Dutch company Booking.com BV is facing a kind of class action suit at the Amsterdam Court from 10.000 hotels after the European Court of Justice decided in September 2024 that the parity clauses (Best price) used by Booking.com are in violation of European competition law. #ThanksEU
And when Facebook/Meta say the #TTPA [1] "is yet another threat to the principles of personalized advertising, ignoring the benefits to advertisers and the people they want to reach." they say exactly what it is all about and why the TTPA is such a DamnGoodThing™ to make radicalisation through very narrowly targeted ads less attractive. So. Yes. #ThanksEU
[1] TTPA explained https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=legissum:4741696
"Social media giant Meta [Facebook, instagram, whatsapp] announced today that it will stop running political, electoral or social issue advertising in the EU from October, instead of complying with the bloc's transparency rules for political advertising."
Original press release from Meta: https://about.fb.com/news/2025/07/ending-political-electoral-and-social-issue-advertising-in-the-eu/
"Solar became the EU’s largest source of electricity for the first time in June 2025. National records for solar and wind rolled in across EU countries in May and June, pushing coal to an all-time low."
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-is-eus-biggest-power-source-for-the-first-time-ever/
A lot of the most vile and far-right content from "conservative" US news outlets is still not available here, almost 10 years after introduction of the #GDPR, as these outlets block traffic from the EU with "This content is not available in the EU, we are working on sorting this out" disclaimers.
I say #ThanksEU — this is actually a good thing :)
Thanks to real time SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area), buying a car for my daughter just took a few minutes. Transferred the money in real time with a few clicks and she will be driving back home in her first ever car now. #ThanksEU
Today was a good day for the #Europe I want to see more of.
https://eci.ec.europa.eu/043/public/#/screen/home
More than 1 million EU citizens supported the ECI (European Citizens Initiative) to ban conversion therapy.
#ThanksEU for creating this tool of direct democratic influence. Thank you https://act.lgbt for doing the hard work of setting this up. Thank you to all who signed.
We can become a better #EU this way. There are a lot of problems to solve. So let's go!
Also, also. Losing such a big chunk of the European grid in a matter of minutes did NOT lead to ripple effects east of France, it seems. Which shows how resilient the grid actually is. This failed in 2006 (see the link in comment #4 of this thread), so it seems lessons have been learned. Which is A Damn Good Thing. At least here in Germany we saw no outages at all, AFAICS. #ThanksEU!
9/n
But to sweeten the deal:
Apple: "the Commission has also closed the investigation on Apple's user choice obligations"
Meta: "the Commission also found that Meta's online intermediation service Facebook Marketplace should no longer be designated under the DMA."
Source: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_1085
And yes, Alphabet/Google could very well be next: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_811
In sum and IMHO (In My Humble Opinion): #ThanksEU :)
2/2
Every post by the @EUCommission attracts some replies by people that clearly are only here to criticise, attack and insult. Always a welcome source for additions to my blocklist. WRT to the post and its topic: #ThanksEU :)
Did you read how Musk promotes tariff-free trade between the US and the EU? Well. Turns out hat was a proposal made by the EU in the week *before* Trump announced new tariffs. Credit where credit is due ;) The EU offer ist still on the table. #ThanksEU
@malteengeler But then I fail to see a problem :) We have regulations that keeps Big Tech at bay (more or less successful) and a s a side-effect those regulations also help in ensuring we won't grow a domestic abusive Big Tech oligopoly. Win-win and #ThanksEU, I'd say :)
I totally forgot to close this thread!
“Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian power systems successfully synchronised with Continental Europe
[…]
This synchronisation has been strongly supported by the European Union and ENTSO-E, the association of European electricity TSOs. Their contributions included technical guidance, operational and legal expertise.
The synchronisation project is implemented with the co-financing of the European Union.”