The European Commission has now formally designated ChatGPT, Reddit, and Roblox as "very large online platforms" under the Digital Services Act, opening them to fines up to 6% of global turnover. It is the moment to stop pretending this is regulation and admit what it is: a tax on platforms the EU cannot build, dressed in the language of governance.
Regulation works when it sets standards a domestic competitor could theoretically meet. The DSA does not. It is written at a scale that only non-European firms face. There is no Zuckerberg-equivalent founder in a Brussels office. There is no TikTok alternative in Berlin. So Brussels does what it does best: it writes rules that feel like principle but function as punishment, then collects the revenue.
The très grandes plateformes designation is the mechanism. The fines are the point. Call it Digital Services Act. Call it European sovereignty. What it actually is: regulatory rent extraction wearing a hard hat.
For Portugal expats, this matters more than it appears. The services they use daily—the platforms that replace slower local infrastructure, that let them work across borders, that keep them connected to family back home—are now explicitly targeted by a bureaucracy that has decided taxation through regulatory threat is easier than building alternatives. When ChatGPT gets fined, when Reddit faces compliance costs that ripple through moderation and features, those costs eventually reach the user.
More broadly, this is what the European welfare state looks like in its final stage of confidence. It has stopped trying to compete. It writes rules instead. It sets standards it can enforce only against the rich, only against Americans, only when there is political cover. The DSA framework sounds sophisticated. The enforcement is simply that Brussels found a way to extract value from platforms its own market could not produce, and called it law.
Look at the structure: rules so complex that compliance requires hiring European compliance specialists. Penalties so severe that they function as negotiation tactics, not deterrence. A Commission so removed from the reality of technical constraint that it can mandate solutions it does not understand. It is the European model in miniature—beautiful in theory, extractive in practice, and ultimately unsustainable because it mistakes paperwork for power.
The real story is not whether ChatGPT or Reddit deserve oversight. They probably do. The real story is that Europe no longer believes it can innovate its way to dominance, so it has chosen extraction and called it regulation. And everyone who lives here—citizen, expat, or anyone using these services—pays the cost in slower services, higher compliance friction, and a regulatory system that works less like law and more like a protection racket run by people who forgot why they were supposed to be building something.