Opinion

Every appeal Meta files, Europe's small firms pay for twice

Two years of findings against Meta and TikTok, and still no final decision. Brussels must close the cases before national bans and patchwork rules do the job for it.

Two years, three sets of preliminary findings against Meta, one against TikTok, and not a single final decision or fine. Brussels has the paperwork. What Europe's small firms and families have is a delay, and the delay has a price. So when Barbara Kathmann tables a Dutch ban on endless scroll and luring notifications, with parliamentarians in seven other countries lined up behind her, we should call it what it is: a lever to force Brussels to finish the job. Not a substitute for it.

Start with what the Commission already found. In July 2026 it preliminarily ruled that Facebook and Instagram are built to be addictive: autoplay, infinite scroll and personalised feeds that put users in autopilot mode. TikTok got the same preliminary findings in February 2026. The fix is written down too: disable infinite scroll and autoplay by default, real screen-time breaks, and a recommender system tuned away from engagement maximisation. TikTok called the case a categorically false and entirely meritless depiction of its platform and vowed to challenge it through every means available. Families are left holding the Commission's own finding that Meta's time tools are too easy to dismiss and that its parental controls depend on parents' technical skill.

And the cost of that contest does not land in Brussels. It lands in two places. On households, whose children keep the night feed while the Commission alleges Meta ignored how much time minors spend on reels and stories at night. The Commission itself warns that diverging national drafts fragment the single market, cut legal certainty and push compliance costs up with uneven protection. It is right. But it helped cause this: it has dragged out the Meta case for two years with no final decision, while a fine of up to 6 percent of Meta's roughly $201 billion turnover in 2025, around $12 billion, hangs in the air.

The fair case against Kathmann is this: national bans on manipulative design create exactly the patchwork the Commission dreads, one clear EU regulation would set a single standard, and the Digital Fairness Act, expected on 11 November, makes her bill redundant lawmaking that firms must relitigate member by member. We agree with one standard. But the standard Brussels promised has not arrived, and every legal challenge runs the clock further. Kathmann's answer is Germany's mandatory cancellation button for online shops, an example of how an initiative by an individual member state is quickly adopted at EU level. That is how this works too. Seven parliaments moving together is pressure, not fragmentation. Her bill covers not only social media but games, dating apps and chatbots, and her enforcement path is simple: a warning first, then a hefty fine, and on repeat offences the platform is switched off.

So the answer is not to strike down Kathmann's bill. It is to make it unnecessary before it takes effect. The Commission must close the DSA cases against Meta and TikTok before the Digital Fairness Act negotiations finish, and write that Act so the cost of reworking addictive design falls on the platforms that engineered it, not on the small developers and shops selling through their app stores. Kathmann herself prefers EU-level enforcement, and says national steps are only possible because an Amsterdam court gave Europe its one algorithm-free option on Instagram and Facebook. Meta is contesting the findings, and every appeal it files, small firms pay for twice. Brussels can stop that. It should.