The European Union, in a fit of regulatory pique, has slapped Temu with a €200m fine. The charge? A familiar one in this age of digital anxiety: failing to protect consumers from dodgy goods and opaque practices. The British online safety regulator, ever eager to prove its relevance, has warned that British platforms should expect a similar crackdown. One cannot help but see the ghosts of Rome and the dying embers of the Victorian era in this bureaucratic theatre.
The EU’s fine is a reminder that even the most robust empires eventually succumb to the temptation of regulation as a substitute for actual vitality. The Romans, after all, spent their final centuries issuing endless edicts about bread and circuses, as if decrees could restore the lost vigour of the Republic. Likewise, the Victorians, with their endless commissions and moral panics, sought to preserve a decaying social order through a thicket of laws. Now, Brussels and Westminster follow suit, mistaking the quill for the sword.
Temu, a Chinese upstart, is but a symptom of a deeper malady: the West’s inability to compete on its own terms. Instead of building better mousetraps, we regulate the ones others build. The fine is not a triumph of consumer protection but a confession of impotence. The real question is not whether Temu complied with obscure directives, but why British and European consumers flock to such platforms. The answer is as uncomfortable as it is obvious: because our own offerings are overpriced, sclerotic, and irrelevant.
The British online safety regulator’s warning is especially rich. Here is a body that has spent years fumbling with the Online Safety Bill, a legislative monstrosity that manages to be both draconian and toothless. Its threat to platforms is like a vicar wagging a finger at a gang of smugglers: earnest, well-meaning, and utterly ignored. If history teaches anything, it is that declining powers compensate for lost greatness with bureaucratic zeal. The later Roman Empire was a paradise for lawyers, not for citizens. The late Victorian era saw a proliferation of regulatory bodies, each more powerless than the last.
Let us not kid ourselves: the EU fine will change nothing. Temu will pay, pass the cost on to consumers, and continue its march. British regulators will issue more stern statements, and the platforms will hire more compliance officers. The decline will continue, not because of Temu, but because we have forgotten how to make things people want to buy. The Chinese understand this. They build, we regulate. They sell, we complain. The parallel with the fall of Rome could not be more stark: while the barbarians built, the Romans debated the finer points of tax law.
What is needed is not a crackdown but a renaissance. We need to rediscover the spirit of industry and innovation that made Britain and Europe great. Instead, we get fines and warnings. The irony is that the very platforms we seek to control are the ones keeping our economies from complete collapse. But no, let us instead play the part of the moralising schoolmarm, tutting at the new kid’s sloppy uniform while ignoring the fact that our own students are failing every exam.
The British regulator should take a long, hard look in the mirror. Rome did not fall because of cheap imports from the East; it fell because it stopped being Rome. We are doing a fine impression of the latter days: all talk, no action, and a growing pile of regulations that serve only to remind us of what we have lost. The Temu fine is a symbol of our decay. Let us hope it is not the final one.
