This paper examines recent innovation in the EU’s approach towards illegal online harm with the development of Codes of Conduct as co-regulatory tools embedded into Regulations. The paper investigates in this respect whether the EU’s policy style is moving away from a consensus-based process to a more coercive, top-down one with use of active solutions to policy problems reflecting the French ‘heroic’ approach in which solutions are imposed on market players (Richardson, 2023).

The first Codes of Conduct and Practice began as self-regulatory measures beginning in 2016 with a Code focused on Countering Illegal Hate Speech. Later, in 2018 and 2022, attention shifted to tackling disinformation online. Initially these Codes acted as soft measures emphasizing factchecking and proactive measures to mitigating disinformation but later evolved to reactive scrutiny of advertising and transparency, the closure of fake accounts and removal of bots. The Commission began to actively compel online platforms to employ technologies for content removal and the empowerment of users. The most recent 2022 Code of Disinformation goes further requiring a reduction in the monetisation of disinformation, clear labelling of political advertising and constraints on the artificial augmentation of disinformation campaigns. Additional measures are in place to ensure media pluralism and access for researchers.

These measures are being embedded into Regulations. As an illustration, the 2018 Regulation on the free flow of non-personal data incorporates a Code of Conduct to facilitate the use and processing of data in the cloud across the EU. The Code of Conduct, which enables organisations to access services such as AI, 5G and the Internet of Things via remote cloud computing services, mandates that European personal data remain on European soil in response to calls for digital sovereignty. In response, US cloud providers are adapting by establishing services like the AWS European Sovereign Cloud and Microsoft’s EU Data Boundary.

Most recently Codes of Conduct are being developed in implementation of the 2022 DSA and 2023 EDMO. Currently Codes of Conduct on Platform-to-Researcher Data Access and Structural Indicators are in development. These are to be followed by a DSA EU Code of Practice on Disinformation. Under EDMO a large number of co-regulatory measures are being use to ban spyware use on journalists, ensure the autonomy of public service broadcasting, introduce media pluralism tests and enhance the transparency of state advertising. The paper will track the development of these Codes and their success as co-regulatory measures.

In recent years, digital sovereignty has become the talk of the town in Brussels and beyond. However, digital sovereignty remains ill-defined in both the literature and real-world discourse. This raises the question why such an ambiguous term has had such a discursive success story. In this paper, I address these debates by arguing that the notion of digital sovereignty is an expression of but also serves to build discursive bridges between two different countermovements against the predominantly neoliberal status quo of digitalization and digital policymaking. In this paper, I argue that the 6 discourse around digital sovereignty is expression of - and as a discursive tool to organize - two countermovements against the neoliberal model of digitalization (governance): A Polanyian countermovement that wants to wrest back rule-making authority from private platforms with the goal of (re-)politicizing digital market design; a Listian countermovement, by contrast, wants to reduce techno-economic dependence from rival or enemy countries through various form of 'government economic activism' with the goal of geopoliticizing digital policymaking. I empirically substantiate this claim through a variety of both qualitative and quantitative methods.

Digitalization is changing socio-political reality at an unprecedented pace. The operations of big technological corporations, with market power being capable to disrupt not only the economic reality but also a political one, call for regulatory attention. Even though there is a common understanding of the necessity of proper governance of digitalization (see G20, OECD), there is no common approach to how to do it. The EU is an active actor, with its Digital strategy covering different aspects of digital world, where drive for innovation is balanced with challenges of digital sovereignty, fundamental rights and values of European integration. Also, new set of digital rights is being confirmed by the EU law and CJEU caselaw giving rise to European digital constitutionalism. Against this background, we can observe a noticeable regulatory trend - the activities of digital corporations are now subject to complex top-down, risk-based legislative action. There is a process of regulatory federalisation - the EU legislator is reaching for regulations (e.g. DMA, DSA, AI Act, E-privacy), which guarantee a unified approach across member states and which have an extraterritorial impact. This paper aims to discuss the impact of the EU’s approach on the global governance of the digital industry.

Through the 2021 Global Gateway, the EU is bundling public and private investments inter alia in
strategic areas such as digital infrastructure, high-performance computing and artificial intelligence
(AI). One goal is to promote EU rules and standards abroad and enable the seamless exchange of data
and digital services (interoperability) with other regions, as well as the physical and cyber-security of
critical infrastructure to protect against the weaponization of economic dependencies (as outlined in
the 2023 Economic Security Strategy). Against that background, the proposed paper evaluates the
Global Gateway as a new tool for promoting the EU’s digital sovereignty and open strategic autonomy.
While the EU has sometimes successfully used its market power to promote its own digital rules (the
so-called “Brussels effect”), the targeted steering of public and private investment in the digital
economy and infrastructure follows a new geo-economic rationale in which the EU exercises greater
public agency to achieve strategic goals in the digital sphere. The proposed paper explains this
development as an orchestrated joint agency of key Member States and the Commission aimed at
overcoming long-standing constraints in foreign affairs that have prevented more active and strategic
international relations of the Union in the past.