The changing liberal international information order: The rise of the EU as a global public regulator

In recent years, the EU has become increasingly recognized as a prominent regulator in internet governance. While case studies in key areas, such as data protection, content regulation, or AI, have highlighted the EU’s regulatory interventions, a more systematic assessment across issue areas is still missing. Our paper provides a comprehensive mapping of the EU’s policy output over time. We constructed an original database that assesses the volume, instruments, orientation, and issuing institution of all EU policy output between 1995 and 2020 across internet governance issue areas. We argue that the EU assumes an increasingly active role in the digital space, as it is increasingly concerned with deeply political matters, including security, democracy, and global competitiveness. Our findings confirm that output has significantly increased in volume. While we find that the bindingness of policy instruments has not increased to the same extent, the rise of soft law demonstrates the EU’s regulatory significance in a domain that is traditionally characterized by voluntary standards. Policy output covers a wide range of issue areas while indicating a potential shift from technical towards more normative issues. Deeply political matters, such as mis/disinformation and hate speech, have prompted a dramatic increase in policy output in the last years. We argue that these perceived threats to democracy have fuelled regulatory interventions by political actors like the European Parliament. Flagship proposals such as the Digital Services Act package similarly illustrate the comprehensive ambitions of the European Commission as a political rather than technocratic regulator. Our paper therefore contributes to understanding the shift in the liberal international information order towards increasing public intervention and regulation.