Is the EU overreaching with new digital regulations?

system that doubles as a universal translator. A pope who uses it to broadcast a message of peace in many different languages simultaneously in the hope of preventing the world from fragmenting. If critics paid any attention when “Vatican III” was published in 1985, they dismissed the novel by Thierry Breton, now the European Union’s commissioner for the internal market, as a literary vanity project typical of ambitious French leaders. Yet “Vatican III” seems prescient today. Although the European Commission, the ’s executive branch, may not be building a virtual equivalent of the Tower of Babel, Mr Breton and other Eurocrats do want to spread their own digital gospel universally and cement the ’s role as the world’s digital über-regulator.The telecoms-cum-computer contraption in Mr Breton’s novel ultimately proves to be a success. Whether the same will be said about the ’s evangelical digital rulemaking is another question. The may have passed, or at least drafted, the world’s most important digital laws. But now it faces the considerably more difficult task of enforcing them. As if to mark this new phase, the commission on September 1st opened an office in San Francisco—an embassy of sorts to work with Silicon Valley firms.