It has been widely reported that the EU’s Code of Practice of Disinformation, a voluntary tech industry code created under the aegis of the European Commission, became mandatory on July 1st: namely, as consequence of its “integration” into the EU’s flagship regulatory legislation, the Digital Services Act (DSA). This is, however, incorrect and is based on a misunderstanding of what the code “integration” means. The Code of Practice is no more mandatory today than it was prior to July 1st.
Companies that are not signatories of the code, like X, are no more bound by its commitments than they were previously. Not being a piece of legislation and having never been considered, much less voted on by the European Parliament, the code could not be rendered binding by the European Commission by fiat. Rather what the European Commission and the European Digital Services Board (an auxiliary body created by the DSA) have done is to recognise signatories’ reporting under the code as a “benchmark” for compliance with the DSA.
This is all that the code “integration” means. It is not an integration into the law as such, but rather into a “framework” of “voluntary codes” – this is the wording of the law – created under Article 45 of the DSA. The DSA itself identifies “disinformation” as a “systemic risk” that so-called “Very Large Online Platforms” (VLOPs) and “Very Large Online Search Engines” (VLOSEs) are required to address.
Thus, the Commission’s February 2025 press release announcing the forthcoming code ‘integration’ explains:
To be recognised as a DSA Voluntary Code of Conduct, the Code needs to fulfil the criteria set out in the Digital Services Act. The Commission and the Board adopted separate positive assessments in this regard, endorsing the official integration of the Code into the DSA framework.
With its integration, full adherence to the Code may be considered as an appropriate risk mitigation measure for signatories designated as VLOPs and VLOSEs under the DSA. As such, the Code will become a significant and meaningful benchmark for determining DSA compliance.
This is not to say that non-signatories of the Code, like X, thus still have no obligation to limit the spread of “disinformation”. It is to say rather that they have had this obligation all along: namely, under the DSA itself. Since they are not signatories of the code, they cannot use code reporting to demonstrate compliance, but they still have to demonstrate compliance by other means: including their public DSA reporting and periodic audits.
This obligation kicked in, more precisely, for all designated platforms, whether code signatories or not, in mid-2023, four months after their designation by the European Commission (as can be seen in Commission ‘DSA Timeline’ below).
As Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier told Tech Policy Press – for an article that nonetheless suggests otherwise! – “Compliance with the Code is voluntary. Compliance with the DSA is not.”
John Rosenthal is a journalist specialising in European politics. His writings have appeared in such venues as World Affairs, World Politics Review and Brussels Signal. His new essay on ‘How the US Can Defeat EU Censorship‘ is available in the Claremont Review of Books.
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Chris Morrison, have you seen this? A paper with evidence that the sun affects the climate, not carbon.
https://x.com/NikolovScience/status/1825929760175739247
And we had the recent papers by Kubicki et al that set the saturation point for CO2 to affect the atmosphere at 300ppm – we currently have 400ppm.
Which leaves ECS as the only possible “culprit” – and estimates of this get lower by the year
“it is not an effective decarbonisation tool for use in homes and buildings”——-But along the coast from where I live in a town called Buckhaven over 200 residents have been having hydrogen piped into their houses to replace gas central heating. They were given free boiler etc. One resident according to a friend who lives in that scheme has refused to accept the bribe because he did his sums and realised that the cost of the hydrogen would be excessive. There was also an article in the Herald that reported the company installing this would not release safety data. —-Go figure.
Philipsfield Secondary Modern, 1st year Physics lesson:
“Now class, today’s challenge revolves around our previous discussions about conservation of energy –
Would it be more sensible to take a highly concentrated form of energy – petrol – to directly power cars or instead use a weak and unreliable form of energy – wind – to generate electricity which would in turn be used in the highly energy-intensive process of extracting hydrogen from water, this leaky and volatile substance eventually being used to power an entire new fleet of vehicles which everyone would be obliged to buy to replace their current ones with?”
The teacher looked at the sea of bemused faces before cracking into a broad grin “Trick question, of course!”
Green hydrogen will be created by the electrolysis of water using “spare” wind and solar electricity. Then it will be stored to provide ‘battery’ back-up when the wind and solar electricity is not available, whereupon the green hydrogen will be burnt in gas-fired power stations to produce electricity…. emitting ‘green’ CO2.
Now class: write a 200 word essay on the scientific and economic idiocy of this project.
My essay: The whole concept is fantasy, science fiction and economic nonsense! There my synopsis powers must be great! The other 190 odd words would simply describe the idiots behind all this in very unpleasant terms.
Re stratospheric water vapour … surely we just need to develop a satellite constellation of giant dehumidifiers and put them into orbit … powered by solar panels … pipe the captured water back into the ocean. C’mon man, use science creatively!
No, no!. There’s too much water in the Pacific already. António said so. Have to pipe it to the Moon instead.
Already in hand. Those ‘planned’ huge orbiting solar panels can be used to focus on the stratospheric water vapour and boil it off into space.
Water vapour in the stratosphere would gradually form huge clouds of ice and already be there. There is no water vapour at -60C or lower! All the water collects at about 20,000 feet or less as you will have noticed if you travel by plane. Water state changes are controlled by temperature, ie. steam, water vapour, liquid, ice. The air is very dry when the temperature is below zero, now why is that? Because water vapour condenses to water at 0C.
Let us imagine that the UK solves the problems of making Green hydrogen, and the problems of distributing it and burning it safely and creates working hydrogen storage caverns (oh come on, that’s only three impossible things and you should have finished breakfast already)…
Brilliant: we’ve solved our ‘fossil fuel problem’.
However, what of the rest of the world? Many countries won’t be as lucky as the UK to have geology suitable for hydrogen storage. They will either have to give up the Green madness* or they will develop some other as yet unknown technical ‘solution’ to energy generation, distribution and consumption. If we go down the salt cavern storage road we’ll be in a technological dead end; we need to adopt a ‘solution’ which can be applied worldwide.
The new technology to pursue is fusion – it’s only 30 years away they say. Meanwhile we have a good working technology in natural gas.
*Of course, to actually give up the Green madness other countries would have to have been paying a bit more than lip-service to it.
Fusion has been ‘only’ 30 years away every year of my life since I was about 15 years old – I’m now 71. It is the energy of the future and always will be.
Spot on. 🙂
But fusion power is more realistic than hydrogen storage under Cheshire.
You have to handle hydrogen with extreme care to get it to explode. Let it loose in the atmosphere and it’s so light it will escape the Earth into space. The Hindenberg burned it didn’t go boom. People typically trap it in an upside down test-tube to create an explosive mixture of hydrogen and oxygen.
Such anti-science alarmism.
The alternative version of the Hindenberg is that it was shot at with an incendiary bullet, fired by a Moe Berg.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360319922056440
The linked article seems to suggest that it is fairly easy to ‘get it wrong’ with hydrogen.
Must have taken a lot of fire-lighters then to get the Sun going.
Hydrogen gas is highly flammable and forms an explosive mixture in air in concentrations of between 4% and 74%.
In a confined space such as a kitchen or living room – I think you will get your ‘boom’ due to the rapid compression of the air, should it ignite, just as you do with natural gas, but it will ‘boom’ at lower concentrations in air than natural gas.
Hydrogen gas cannot defy gravity and fly off into space: Exhibit A – that big ball of hydrogen in tte sky called the Sun.
“Blackouts and severe rationing will be inevitable”.
Rationing is a feature of the system, not a bug.
And what has this to do with green hydrogen? Is hydrogen from other sources and better?
Tomorrow we will reveal how organically grown tobacco damages your health.
a modern industrial society
The mistake is to think that this is what Militwat wants.
And from this article clearly the Millipede has no clue whatsoever about how his utopia can be achieved.
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/stark-sends-out-sos
It is a mistake to assume Socialists want to replace what exists with something better – destruction of what we have is the reward.
Just like vandals who destroy a bus shelter or park bench, they don’t want to replace them with something better, it’s just the sheer joy of destroying that thrills.
All in all, hydrocarbons look like a good alternative to renewables. Better cars and lorries, there when needed, less environmental impact, way cheaper, tiny footprint, pipework there for gas, grid there for electricity.
This is huge, surely! How can the media not be shoving this under the nose of glazed-over nutcases like Miliband? But they won’t – and even if they do, the glow of the Soros billions will outshine it.
If there is no climate emergency, why even bother to discuss hydrogen?
‘There is no cost effective, feasible, reliable and scalable replacement for hydrocarbons.’ Eh? Has CM never heard of Small Modular Reactors? They tick all his boxes. Oil for most forms of transport, gas for heating and cooking, SMRs to produce electricity – job done.
Good article, but those of us who say this kind of thing to Government are regularly cancelled. The lack of scientific knowledge in Government, the CS etc. is astounding, and the lack of interest even worse. This should all be put to Millibrain in a prime time TV programme at least half an hour long, so that he might understand! No chance the BBc though, they are worse if that is possible.
Marvellous article. Another dead end for the Net Zero madness.
Bravo.
Superb article clearly showing the deliberate catastrophe being engineered by these fraudsters.
For anyone interested, here’s a link to the many graphs etc I have collected re AGW over the years
https://www.mediafire.com/file/uo35er4g4lzni0e/Images.zip/file
And also Javier Vinos series on the sun and climate, published on Judith Curry’s blog
https://www.mediafire.com/file/dnvi9tpchuddyl5/NatureUnbound.pdf/file
323 pages long – but written with the lay person in mind