The Digital Omnibus and the Collapse of Behavioral Governance: A Structural Breakdown

The Digital Omnibus did not merely exempt cranes from the EU AI Act. It rewired the governance-selection function of the Act itself—replacing behavioral governance with sectoral epistemology, drift monitoring with legacy equipment assumptions, and risk-based regulation with leverage-based exemption. This technical note provides a nine-section structural breakdown of that replacement, extending the working paper published at DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20100269. The central finding: the Digital Omnibus deregulated governance physics, not just governance policy. It replaced the behavioral primitives that made the AI Act coherent with a political sorting mechanism that produces incoherent enforcement as a structural output. The crane exemption is not an anomaly. It is the first proof that the new mechanism works—and a precedent every sector with sufficient political leverage can now replicate. Risk is constant. Autonomy is constant. Drift is constant. Governance coverage is now the variable. that is the inversion the Digital Omnibus produced.