The EU Rulebook Behind the EU Rulebook
Some furniture arrives as a flat box and a promise. The EU digital rulebook does just that. Its 34 main instruments sit on EUR-Lex, free, in twenty-four languages, from the eCommerce Directive of 2000 to the Health Data Space Regulation of 2025. One would expect to find the single market fully assembled, since that is what each of them announces in its opening recital. What one finds instead, on actually reading all 34, is the frame and an assembly notice. The shelves come later, by delegated act, by implementing act, by harmonized standard, drafted by other hands on another calendar. So I started cataloging the missing shelves, and ended up with 517 of them. This means the EU legislator, 517 times, decided that the rule would be written later, by someone else, under a different procedure.