Yes that's how it's done in France for instance, and generally how it's being discussed in the EU.

The EP paper appears to be highlighting the existence of a debate regarding VPN.

Relevant quote:

"Some argue that this is a loophole in the legislation that needs closing and call for age verification to be required for VPNs as well. In response, some VPN providers argue that they do not share information with third parties and state that their services are not intended for use by children in the first place. The Children's Commissioner for England has called for VPNs to be restricted to adult use only.

While privacy advocates argue that imposing age-verification requirements on VPNs would pose significant risk to anonymity and date protection, child-safety campaigners claim that their widespread use by minors requires a regulatory response. Pornhub and other large pornography platforms have reportedly lost web traffic following the enforcement of age-verification rules in the UK, while VPN apps have reached the top of download rankings."

Of course I'm not saying the EU won't regulate VPNs, but nowhere in this paper is "the EU" stating that VPNs need closing.

Also, not sure what makes it so impossible (debates on whether a given law is in effect seem pretty rare, though it does exist), but that may depend on where you come from and the applicable legal system.

This sounds like there would be some kind of revenge, but I struggle to imagine any kind of consequence. Did you have something in mind?

It being an all time high was just to highlight how much "not-crashing" they are, but that doesn't really matter. Even if stocks were merely flat over the past year (or even somewhat down), the general point would still be the lack of a stock market crash.

About what though? You haven't explained what you meant by a crash so I don't have much more to go by to understand your point.

If not the stock market, what's the market you mean is currently crashing?

The stock market being at an all-time high, a crash in the usual meaning of this term is not, by definition, currently happening.

Since apparently this isn't what you mean by "crash", could you define what you mean by this term so we're all on the same page?

While I don't have statistics on free solo death rate per climb compared to death per car trip, this is most likely very, very wrong. You should really stop throwing such strange wild claims..

"Somehow" makes it sound like a strange situation, but it seems quite normal that the EU would care more about its own citizens than a foreign land, even if it is a close neighbor.

Sorry if I'm missing the point but if Apple had picked OpenAI, couldn't you have made the same comment? "nobody else can be the default voice assistant or power Siri, so where does this leave eg Gemini/Claude?".

However I don't see the link, how they are "using their duopoly", and why "they" would be using it but only one of them benefits from it. Being a duopoly, or even a monopoly, is not against anti-trust law by itself.

I admit I don't see the issue here. Companies are free to select their service providers, and free to dominate a market (as long as they don't abuse such dominant position).