"This transaction will close following receipt of the necessary regulatory approvals"

I think it would be helpful for people in this thread to understand the differences between EU Regulations and Directives :

• EU Regulation: A binding legal act that applies immediately and identically in all EU countries as soon as it takes effect, without needing national laws.

• EU Directive: A legislative act that sets a mandatory goal that all EU countries must achieve, but allows each nation to pass its own laws to implement it.

It takes time for directives to take effect, unless a member state's national law already implements them.

Because it is an EU-DIRECTIVE.

Directives are not the same as regulations .

Directives are goals that must be achieved by adapting existing national laws or introducing new ones, and that takes time.

Sadly, the EU is also lax when it comes to enforcing regulations. See GDPR.

GDPR enforcement belongs to individual country information commissioners, unfortunately.

The EU is not as federal as the US and has basically no "federales" law enforcement of its own.

The EU is in effect much closer to a confederation than a federation. A lot of the problematic aspects of how the EU is set up are attempts to work around the limitations imposed by not having sufficient public support to reform it into a more federal structure. To some that's a feature, of course, to others it's a significant nuisance.

And the practical effect of this is you get a race to the bottom: countries compete on how lax they are going to be in enforcing GDPR so as to attract American tech companies.

The Data Protection Commission in Ireland are remarkably lax about enforcing it because the government quite likes the tax revenue that Google, Apple and Meta brings them.

It's not a race to the bottom any more than competition lowering consumer prices is a race to the bottom. It's one of the few checks on governments just demanding more and more tax money for little return.

No as much lax as lacking resources to deal with widespread violations. They probably focus on the most egregious cases.

Isn't GDPR a directive as well?

No, the clue is in the name, "General Data Protection Regulation". If it were a directive, it would be called GDPD.

It was already decided in 1998 to phase out nuclear power under the SPD–Green coalition. They passed the Nuclear Exit Law in 2002.

It’s mostly the Green Party’s fault, as they have been vehemently anti-nuclear since their inception(1970s).

The road to gigatonnes of CO2 is paved with the good intentions of the Greens in every country.

Ok. Soviet influence operation.

You know people love rUsSiA iS nOt ThE sAmE aS uSsR.

But having read "Stalin" by Stephen Kotkin I've concluded that the USSR was nothing more than a legal construction to increase Russian control over its neighbors.

Why do you think that in 1998 Russia was not influencing Germany to use its gas?

Moreover, Russia and its coopting of the German Left and Greens is well documented.

Gerhard Schröder, chancellor 1998-2005, is well known to be best buddies with Putin and later (three weeks after leaving office!) worked for Gazprom. He is nicknamed "Gas-Gerd".

Schröder also famously called Putin a "true democrat".

> Schröder also famously called Putin a "true democrat".

I do not get why you're mentioning this as an ironic thing. Dictatorship is the culmination of the democratic process. There are tons of historical examples at hand throughout history, just to name a few: Julius Caesar, Augustus Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Pinochet, Fidel Castro, Trump etc. they all channeled the democratic power of the masses to increase and consolidate their own power.

Just because it has happened in the past doesn't mean it's good for "the masses".

So yes, it's ironic because "the masses" normally want democracy, but the person you're responding to is conflating two things one which is good for "the masses" and the other one is bad.

They had an emi license before .