Another way to read this is the tech companies are stupidly bankrolling the EU by not complying with the laws of the lands (EU states voluntarily enact their own implementations of EU directions in return for a slice). That’s far too good a cash cow to pass up. Keep it coming.

> But they are enough to continually fund the EU regulatory bureaucracy itself

Why do people keep repeating this falsehood? The EU budget is hundreds of billions of Euros. Even the largest fines so far would be a drop in the bucket compared to that. But more importantly it's the individual member states that invoke those fines (like Ireland with the €1.2B GDPR fine on Meta) not the EU itself.