Directive

And let me tell you, if you're interested in ventilation, public health and the future of our built environment, this is probably the most important policy development in a generation.

It centres on the Updated Energy Performance of Building Directive, or the EPBD.

Now, for those of us who've been in the sector for a while, we know the EPBD has been the cornerstone of European building energy policy since 2002.

But historically, it was strictly about one thing, energy efficiency, decarbonisation, tighter building seals, reducing carbon footprints.

in buildings.

Civil society, organisations and industrial bodies rallied together and their advocacy led to a momental recast of the EPBD in 2024 that really centred around indoor environmental quality.

For the first time in history, the Directive explicitly binds indoor environmental quality, i.e. EQ, including temperature, humidity, ventilation rates and air contaminants, right alongside energy performance goals.

It formally acknowledges that energy efficiency cannot and must not come at the expense of human health.

When someone tells him, it's like this everywhere, the answer isn't just, no, it isn't.

The answer is, here's the EU directive, here's the Singaporean Small Claims Tribunal, here's the German rental law.

The specific example does the work that conviction can't.

Germany is the one that makes Israeli rental law look, as Daniel put it, like the jungle.

And he's right that the specific counterexample is the only real answer.

You don't win that argument with vibes.

You win it with the German Rent Index and the EU Directive and the Singaporean Tribunal.

Let me add one more comparative case that doesn't get enough attention.

Let's look at Europe.

The EU Directive on Consumer Alternative Dispute Resolution explicitly requires that mediators be remunerated in a way that is not linked to the outcome of the procedure.

Right.

The EU recognizes that when a neutral's pay depends on a settlement, the neutral's no longer truly independent.

I come at it from a different way.

You are conflating two entirely different ecosystems.

The EU directive you just cited is strictly for consumer disputes.

The ethical obligation of neutrality doesn't disappear just because the parties have higher net worth.

Product image galleries tied to individual variants are now available out of the box rather than requiring a plugin.

And for EU merchants, the order withdrawal flow we discussed in our August twentieth coverage is now available as an optional feature, helping stores comply with EU Directive twenty twenty-three's mandatory electronic withdrawal button requirement.

Looking at the broader security landscape from the past two weeks, uh, we saw the continued fallout from the Adobe Commerce APSB twenty-six ninety-two active exploitation that was confirmed in mid-August.

The account takeover vulnerability that allows unauthenticated remote write access to customer accounts was being exploited in the wild within days of disclosure.

We've just seen the representative action from the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme against Uber in the Dutch GPA investigation.

We also see class actions happening, many in the Netherlands, because the Netherlands has a class action law that predates already the European Directive.

Also for data protection violations.

But for big tech, that actually is more difficult because most of big tech is located in Ireland.

Let's start by actively reviewing the cornerstone document.

Directive EU 2024 1899 on common rules promoting the repair of goods.

Got it.

This was adopted by the European Parliament and the Council on the 13th of June 2024.

Most European markets want to run this through local flexibility markets.

Not the least because EU Directive 944 that set the scene for the flexibility market, aggregators and all of that, says that the use of flexibility should be done through markets.

So we can accommodate that and we can integrate in local flexibility markets.

And then in Australia, New Zealand, and very popular now in the United States is this dynamic operating envelopes, where you use our digital twin on real time to understand what is the limit in each feeder, in each transformer, and then set up limits on, for example, the PV inverters so that they don't inject more than the local grid can take.

On a more forward-looking note, WooCommerce 11.1 entered beta on August 18th with a target release of September 1st.

The most notable feature is a complete native order withdrawal flow that addresses the EU Directive 2023 and 2673 requirement for an electronic withdrawal button.

This is significant because the directive took effect on June 19th, 2026, meaning every online store selling to EU consumers technically needs this functionality already.

WooCommerce 11.1 also includes a new REST API refund calculation endpoint and several bug fixes from the 11.0 cycle.