this has some Italian origin and links to a typical behavior you see there: doing business is hard, it is much easier to look at who is making money and pretend

this has some Italian origin and links to a typical behavior you see there: doing business is hard, it is much easier to look at who is making money and pretend somehow a share, Instead of properly investing in R&D you just look at who is making money: I've heard them saying: they make billions thanks to "our" cables, they have to give us some! Lobbies have been working on this for years: now that they saw that even gas can be declared green, or that you can turn the EU in a guns buyer in few months (so that, somehow, anything goes) they are kicking harder. A good term to be used to denigrate this attitude is to use the Italian slang 'pizzo', so I would call it: the 'pizzo EU proposal'