 | , - |
 | Raymond Aron room, Paris Dauphine-PSL University |
Opening conference of the Dauphine Digital Days
The EU has enacted an extensive body of digital legislations, mostly under the Digital Agenda and the Digital Single Market (DSM) initiatives of the von der Leyen Commission : i.e. the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the Digital Services Act (DSA), the Data Act, the Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act), the Data Governance Act (DGA), the European Health Data Space (EHDS), an update to the regulation on electronic identification and trust services (eIDAS 2) and a measure to strengthen the cybersecurity of critical infrastructure (NIS2). Together with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) enacted during the previous legislature, these initiatives have made of the EU the jurisdiction with the most comprehensive digital regulatory framework, framing not only the activity of technology manufacturers and digital services providers, but also that of the users whether they are large or small corporations, NGOs or public administrations. This has been triggering a set of fierce debates both about the substance of each of these legislations and about the expected outcomes for the EU in terms of innovation, competitiveness, welfare of citizens, protection of democratic values, etc.
An overlooked aspect of this far-reaching regulatory policy has so far been its implementation. As in other fields (Green deal, etc.), different stakeholders have called for a pause on the legislative front to allow the EU to focus on effective enforcement. One of the key characteristics of all these legislations is that they are ‘EU Regulation,’ directly applicable in all Member States (by contrast with EU Directives), which allows for harmonization on the substantive side of policy but does not always set in stones the concrete allocation of regulatory powers national level. Indeed, Member States choose the National Regulatory Agency (NRA) which will be in charge of implementing each of these regulations. In practice, each EU member state can decide to establish a specialized entity or ask a set of pre-existing agencies to implement the various components of these regulations; with a request to coordinate the work of those agencies within and across national borders. The NRAs in charge of the various sub-sets of the European digital regulatory corpus are thus requested to cooperate horizontally, even though they might be granted with different mandates and status in each country. Even for the DMA, where a ‘division of labor’ between the DG Comp of the EU Commission and the national antitrust authorities is instituted, the frontier of DMA and antitrust enforcement is already a source of debate and will have to be fine-tuned in view of concrete experience.
While this choice of a distributed implementation of a common legislation might be explained by the EU context, difficulties of Member States to relinquish sovereignty or a form of path dependency in the allocation of regulatory powers, the resulting governance arrangement might be questioned. Indeed, alternative choices could have been considered, such as the creation at the national level of a dedicated Digital Regulation Authority and/or the establishment at the European level of a (or a set of) specialized agency(ies).
The aim of this conference will be to take stock of the existing landscape, with its intrinsic risks and limits, and discuss whether a more integrated, at least coordinated, system of regulatory governance could be established. In the context of this debate, the short-term issues of transaction costs and consistency, and their impact in terms of compliance, will be considered. But we will also focus on the long-term perspective of adaptation and development of capabilities which are crucial for the sustainability of a regulatory framework.
Speakers:
- Oles ANDRIYCHUK
University of Exeter School of Law | Digital Markets Research Hub YouTube weekly discussions - Antoine BABINET
Deputy Head of Unit in Digital Platform directorate of DG Competition; European Commission - Gabriele CAROVANO
Case handler - Italian Competition Authority - Digital platforms and communications Unit - Consumer Protection Directorate - Thomas COURBE
Directeur Général, Direction Générale des Entreprises, Ministère de l’Economie, des Finances et de l’Industrie, Ministère chargé du Budget et des Comptes Publics - Guillaume DUQUESNE
Senior Vice President Compass Lexecon - Rishabh KAUSHAL
Postdoc at Institute of Data Science (IDS) in Department of Advanced Computer Science (DACS) at Maastricht University, Netherlands. Assistant Professor at Department of Information Technology, Indira Gandhi Delhi Technical University for Women - Alexandre LACRESSE
Cours de Justice de l’Union Européenne - Jean-Yves OLLIER
Conseiller d'État - Jens PRÜFER
Director, Tilburg Law and Economics Center
Professor in Economics, School of Economics, University of East Anglia
Deputy Director, Centre for Competition Policy
Principal Investigator, Horizon Europe project AI4POL
Member, Expert group to the EU Observatory on the Online Platform Economy - Irene ROCHE LAGUNA
Head of Unit in DG CONNECT in the European Commission. My Unit is called “Coordination and Regulatory compliance”, and we deal precisely with the legal coordination of the DSA and DMA with other Union law and national instruments, and we organise the DSA Board and the DMA High Level Group. - Alexandre DE STREEL
CERRE & Université de Namur
