European digital policymaking: when Internet regulation meets EU decision-making

Abstract

In recent years, regulation of the digital sector has been an increasing priority on the EU agenda. The GDPR, the Digital Single Market strategy, and more recently the Digital Services Act (DSA), all bare different dimensions of the complex relationship between the European regulator and Internet platforms. This panel aims to bring a trans-sectorial, trans-policy, and trans-institutional approach to the “European digital policymaking”, coupled with a differentiated theoretical lense - political sociology, discourse analysis, comparative politics, governance theory, and historical institutionalism. To do so, we want to focus on the EU decision-making process in relation to platform regulation and its implications, be it in the ordinary legislative procedure, the ex-ante agenda-setting, or the ex-post CJEU case law. EU digital policies have indeed recently attracted growing attention from scholars, following the multiplication of legislative activities addressing internet-related issues. Aside from the revolution of social practices they brought about (Rieffel, 2014), Internet platforms raise different kinds of regulation issues, at times contradictory, leading to political dilemmas for policymakers (Nooren and al., 2018; Van Djick and al. 2018). From a political economy perspective, as both market gatekeepers and facilitators for the circulation of digital goods, they for instance directly challenge competition policy. The literature has documented the increasingly active role of the EU in internet policies in the fields of data governance (Borgogno and Colangelo, 2019), privacy (Bennett & Raab, 2020), copyright (Meyer, 2017) and cybersecurity (Christou, 2019). Aside from the role of the EU in internet governance debates, as well as the nature and impacts of these policy developments, more limited are academic attempts to explore the complex political processes and controversies shaping EU digital policies. In dialogue with the growing literature in ‘platform studies’ (Gorwa, 2019), this panel proposes to investigate further the actors and processes that will shape the future of Internet platforms’ governance and rules (Marsden, 2011) at the European level.

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