Roundtable - Author meets critics: Brexit and the Digital Single Market

Abstract

How has Brexit affected policy formation at UK and EU levels? Alison Harcourt’s book ‘Brexit and the Digital Single Market’ (OUP, 2023) addresses this question by examining the effect of Brexit on policy formation in the DSM policy sectors (audio-visual media services, creative industries, telecommunications, e-commerce, online platforms, and FinTech, data protection, and copyright). Policy networks characterise UK based policy-making, wherein the private sector, government departments, professional organisations, civil society, and other key interests engage in complex bargaining processes. This encouraged a higher level of lobbying activity which historically spilled over from the UK to the EU level with a large number of UK-based interest groups represented in EU consultations. This was highly evident in the digital sector where UK-based stakeholders long dominated EU level policy formation. Brexit may have signalled an end to pluralist style lobbying in the EU and a return to more neo-corporatist models of representation within the sector. As Menz (2003: 549) explains, ‘strongly neo-corporatist and statist systems produce self-preserving protectionist responses’. The loss of UK state representation in the EU has greatly changed the opportunity structure stakeholders. As the UK model wanes, the EU is taking a much more hands-on approach to regulation of the digital sector, following an older path of industrial policy favouring digital sovereignty, stricter control over data privacy, the promotion of European champions and the curtailing of large US groups in European markets. Panellists: • Philipp Trein, Université de Lausanne • Javier Espinoza, Financial Times • Representative of UK Office of Communications (Ofcom)