Conference Agenda

The current digital order is shaped by a growing array of national policies on data governance, with countries implementing frameworks to address data privacy, cybersecurity, and digital markets. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a transformative force, driving economic growth and technological innovation, and compelling governments to develop strategies for its governance. As a leading actor in international standard-setting, the European Union (EU) has established the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), widely recognised as the “gold standard” for data governance, and has pioneered the AI Act, the first comprehensive legislative framework for regulating AI. These initiatives have positioned the EU as a significant actor in global digital governance.

However, in an era of intensifying geopolitical competition and a rapidly evolving digital order, the EU faces the challenge of maintaining its normative position amidst the unfolding technological rivalry between the United States and China. Using a theoretical framework derived from diffusion studies, this research examines how the EU’s data governance model has shaped global practices and evaluates the EU’s capacity to replicate this influence in AI governance. Drawing on open-source materials, including official government documents, legal texts, and policy analyses, this study assesses the EU’s ability to navigate regulatory divergences between the US innovation-driven model and China’s state-centric approach. Ultimately, it explores whether the EU can sustain its normative position in the digital domain, positioning itself as a distinct pole in a multipolar digital order and countering the dominance of the US and China in the new technological cold war.

The aim of this paper to provide a survey of state data sovereignty laws and policies in the Member States and analyse them from the perspective of whether they cause legal fragmentation and, as a result, fragmentation in the European data space. Our method involves collecting the relevant national legal and policy documents as adopted and amebded in the period between 2014 and 2024 (1), coding their provisions (2), developing a legal and policy survey map (3), and analysing their potential to cause fragmentation (4). Based on these results, we will analyse possibilities for legal and policy harmonisation at European Union level.

A judicialised understanding of borders, regulation and social media focussing upon caselaw and courts is argued not to be accurate with Big Tech’s engagement with EU law. As a key example of global governance, the transatlantic place in Big Tech has witnessed a vast array of actions that warrant better explanation than a series of caselaw emerging. The transatlantic consumer is often at the core of the place of lawyering, but not necessarily in the most direct way. The rules of contracts have become increasingly important in Big Tech- capable of being manipulated. A key issue further arising is also the transatlantic in the overarching rules, eg the spread of EU law often to the US, to California and its place in Big Tech’s operational models, provisions and rules. Other chapters outline jurisdictional powers and how Big Tech engages. Jurisdictional contest is another form of transatlantic lawyering that takes place, where the OOS is utilised by Big Tech in their favour, taking advantage of a light touch regulatory structure and low-level enforcement of EU law rules.