Digital Fines to Fund Culture: Will Parliament Act?
If you were invited to name one New Year’s wish for Europe’s cultural sector in 2026, what would it be? There are numerous contenders, from a basic income for artists to governments that safeguard artistic freedom. At Culture Action Europe, one wish stands out for 2026: using digital fines to fund culture.
In 2026, the EU will continue negotiations on its next seven-year budget, the Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) 2028–2034. At first glance, the prospects for cultural funding in this budget appear promising. The European Commission has proposed a new umbrella programme—AgoraEU—to support culture, media, and civil society. Its total proposed budget is €8.6 billion, including €1.8 billion for the Creative Europe – Culture strand and €3.2 billion for the MEDIA+ strand.
This represents a doubling of the current Creative Europe Programme 2021–2027, or a 71% increase when adjusted for inflation. In addition, the European Parliament has put forward a proposal (not yet approved) to increase the AgoraEU budget by €880 million.
However, those numbers are politically fragile. Member States will scrutinise every euro, as the EU budget is primarily funded by national contributions. Despite the apparent doubling, the scale of EU funding for culture remains modest, especially when many governments are cutting spending. €1.8 billion for culture over seven years amounts to roughly €260 million per year. For comparison, the annual expenditure of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 2024 was €254 million.
While every programme is asking for more money and Member States are reluctant to increase their contributions, the real question is: where will the money come from?
The idea Culture Action Europe proposes is simple: whenever the European Commission fines big tech, make sure those fines top up AgoraEU’s budget. The Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, and the AI Act all allow the European Commission to impose fines on tech companies for non-compliance with EU digital regulation. A recent example is the €120 million fine imposed on X for breaching its transparency obligations under the Digital Services Act.
Why do we think using digital fines to fund culture is a good idea? Here are our arguments:
- It won’t cost Member States anything. They wouldn’t have to chip in any extra. The EU is already imposing fines on big tech, using procedures that are fully in place.
In 2025, the first fines have been issued under the Digital Markets Act: €500 million for Apple and €200 million for Meta. Additional Commission proceedings are currently ongoing under both the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act. Subject to negotiations on the Digital Omnibus package, the AI Act will be fully applicable from 2 August 2026. If these fines could be redirected to support European creators, the total sum at stake could reach several billion euros.
Unlike other redistribution mechanisms, such as financial contributions from streaming platforms under the Audiovisual Services Directive, channelling digital fines to culture would not require assigning new bodies or making major administrative changes. The process is already there; it simply needs a clear policy decision to direct the funds where they can make the most impact.
- There is already a precedent.The idea of using fines to top up programmes is not new. In the current 2021–2027 MFF, the EU established a mechanism that directed competition fines to boost seven programmes. It is called ‘programme-specific adjustment’: money arising from EU antitrust and merger enforcement is allocated to Horizon Europe, InvestEU Fund, EU4Health, Erasmus+, Creative Europe, CERV, and Integrated Border Management Fund. Each programme receives a share of fines, with the total projected at €11 billion (2018 prices). The distribution follows a fixed percentage: Creative Europe receives 5.45% of the total.
If you look closely at the Creative Europe legal base, you’ll notice that its total €2.44 billion budget consists of a regular envelope plus a top-up. The Regulation sets a €1.84 billion envelope and explicitly adds extra €600 million from competition fines.
The idea of topping up flagship programmes with fines was promoted by the European Parliament during the 2020 MFF negotiations. Members of the European Parliament pushed to boost funding for people-oriented programmes to address the negative social and economic impacts of the pandemic.
Sadly, this mechanism is gone from the Commission’s MFF proposal. Instead, the Commission has suggested that all fines be directed to the Flexibility Instrument to finance emergency spending (in the past, it has been mobilised mainly to respond to migration challenges and security threats).
- Using digital fines to fund culture is a fair choice. Online platforms generate extraordinary profits by monetising attention largely fuelled by culture and creative expression. In 2024, $161.5 billion of Meta’s $164.5 billion total revenue came from advertising, selling ad space around what people watch, share, and engage with, including music, video, journalism, and other cultural content. Yet this value is poorly shared. The Streams & Dreams Part 2 report shows that only 5.1% of artists are satisfied with their streaming income, while 87.6% believe revenues are distributed unfairly. Digitalisation has expanded audiences, but not fair pay.
Meanwhile, AI training relies heavily on copyrighted content which is often accessed by bots without asking or paying. Courts are already confronting evidence of AI models trained on pirated material: in Bartz v. Anthropic, a judge noted that the company had downloaded and stored more than seven million pirated books. Anthropic’s agreement to pay $1.5 billion to authors to settle a lawsuit only highlights a deeply unfair system in which creators are forced to resort to litigation to seek compensation, bearing the burden of proving and enforcing their rights.
In Europe, the regional court in Munich ruled in the GEMA v. OpenAI case that OpenAI had trained its AI on protected content from nine German songs. The court ordered OpenAI to pay damages for using copyrighted material without permission.
It is estimated that by 2028, 24% of music creators’ and 21% of audiovisual creators’ revenues will be at risk, resulting in a cumulative loss of €22 billion for creators in these sectors over 5 years.
Redirecting part of digital enforcement fines to culture is a concrete way to return value to the creators whose work underpins the digital economy. In addition, investing in human creativity is more important than ever, as AI ‘slop’ (Word of the Year 2025, by the way) is multiplying rapidly and producing increasingly homogenised, unoriginal content. Supporting challenging and truly creative work is needed if we want high-quality data and meaningful cultural expression online.
Which nuances should be considered for the digital fines mechanism?
- Political context.The US has long pressured the EU over its tech rules, claiming they specifically target American companies. At the end of 2025, the US imposed a travel ban on former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton, one of the key architects of the Digital Services Act.
We cannot exclude the option that in the future, EU digital policies may become a bargaining chip, meaning fines could be imposed or waived based on political decisions rather than mere compliance. Moreover, under the current US administration, there is no guarantee that platforms like X will end up paying the fines issued to them by the European Commission.
That’s why fines should never be treated as guaranteed income. Culture Action Europe advocates for these digital fines to be allocated to AgoraEU on top of the earmarked budget envelope, rather than replacing it.
- Digital fines don’t fix the underlying imbalance between big tech and the cultural sector. They don’t, by themselves, address the displacement effects of AI, job losses caused by automation, or the use of copyrighted content for AI training without asking or paying.
More far-reaching digital, economic, and social measures are needed. There are plenty of ideas in circulation, from opt-in rules instead of opt-outs to new levy or tax models.
It is true that digital fines are relatively small compared to the overall damage inflicted on the cultural sector. But they are also politically pragmatic: a mechanism that already exists, can be tested quickly, and can build credibility for more structured redistribution models later. If a single large fine could equal the annual Creative Europe budget, supporting thousands of creators, organisations, and audiences across Europe, it is worth fighting for.
- The Flexibility Instrument. In the current MFF proposal, all fines are expected to flow into the Flexibility Instrument. The Commission wants a more agile budget that can respond faster to new shocks and emergencies. Some will argue that directing fine revenue to specific programmes undermines that flexibility.
We understand the argument. However, we are asking not for all fines. We are proposing a targeted mechanism for specific categories of digital enforcement fines on fairness grounds. When programme-specific allocations were introduced last time, the sector was hit by the pandemic; today, the rapid digital developments have hit the sector no less. Culture Action Europe believes a partial, targeted response is justified, while other fines can still feed the Flexibility Instrument.
What needs to be done concretely?
First, the programme-specific adjustment needs to be put back on the table. It is currently absent from the Commission’s proposal for the MFF Regulation, but it could be reinstated through a separate article. This article should specify that revenue from fines imposed under the Digital Services Act (Regulation (EU) 2022/2065), the Digital Markets Act (Regulation (EU) 2022/1925), and the AI Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689) shall be available for an additional allocation of commitment appropriations for year n+1, starting for the year 2029 and ending in 2034, to the selected programmes, such as AgoraEU. Article 5 of the current MFF Regulation can serve as a model.
Second, the proposed AgoraEU Regulation should explicitly cross-reference the new article in the MFF Regulation. Alongside the proposed financial envelope of €8.58 billion, it should state that the programme’s budget shall be increased by an additional allocation as a result of the programme-specific adjustment.
How can these changes be achieved?
We believe the ball is in the European Parliament’s court. It was the Parliament that proposed this mechanism during the previous MFF negotiations. Now, the Parliament is preparing its position on the next MFF, which is expected to be put to a vote in May 2026. However, amendments are already being collected.
The Parliament’s report should explicitly include the fines mechanism, as it did in the past. Culture Action Europe therefore calls on the BUDG Committee, together with the CULT and LIBE Committees, to take the lead and include a programme-specific adjustment based on digital fines in their MFF positions.
Civil society organisations can support this effort by reaching out to the relevant rapporteurs (listed here and here), preferably in the first weeks of January 2026. If you want to write to MEPs and need help or more information, please contact luiza@cultureactioneurope.org and rhys@cultureactioneurope.org.