What the EU is doing is not working.
The legislative effort is real, well intentioned, and groundbreaking. It reflects democratically the wishes of half-a-billion people that include some of the fairest and most sensible countries on the planet. So ignore the hallucinating tech bros. EU legislation is certainly in the direction of what a good digital society looks like.
But there is no response on the ground. From the tech makers. Remember the timeless Buckminster Fuller quote: you need to make a new model that makes the old model obsolete. Why aren't there any actors taking the clear legislative signals at heart to create the new digital model?
Here are some hypotheses / flow chart:
* there are no such actors. too much focus on luxury goods, not much on tech. mass migration of talent to the US has created a desert.
* there are actors but they don't get funded to act. If that is the case, we need to ask: there are gazillions of euros rotting, so why is this not happening? Possible causes:
\* financiers don't actually buy the legislative agenda. they think it will be watered down / defanged by the FAANGS
\* financiers belong to a group that doesn't actually *like* this legislative agenda (they bank on surveillance capitalism and the like for guaranteed returns)
Whatever the fundamental challenges and first causes, unless there is bottom-up buildup of alternative approaches the top-down agenda will eventually fail.