Summary: The EPO is (and has been over the past decade or more) run by a bunch of drunkards; Worst of all, António Campinos has absolutely no oversight at the EPO; the tail wags the dog...
They don't care about the users and issuing a few bytes with random characters costs them next to nothing. It gives them control over billions of human beings.
If even one media outlet told you in 2010 that Microsoft would fall from 100% (of Web requests) to about 1 in 8 Web requests, you'd probably struggle to believe it