Conference Agenda

The European Union (EU) has positioned itself as a global leader in data governance, exemplified by its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and its efforts to regulate the flow and use of data across borders. This paper explores how cooperation in data governance is achieved among supranational organizations (e.g., the EU), sovereign states (e.g., the United States), and multinational corporations, despite their conflicting interests. By introducing the concept of Non-Common Interest Cooperation and focusing on Nested Interests, the study reveals how these actors reconcile their differences to sustain fragile cooperation. The paper argues that nested interest-based cooperation can produce strong short-term collaboration but tends to weaken over the long term due to external pressures from technological advancements, geopolitical shifts, and economic interests. Using a Triangular Cooperation Framework, the study categorizes data into commercial data, public data, and personal data, and examines how these categories shape the dynamics of cooperation. This research contributes to the understanding of global data governance by highlighting the fragility of cooperation and the challenges posed by external disruptions.

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.

In my PhD project "The 'Governance Turn' in EU Digital Policy", I analyse the development of EU digital policy with a focus on data and content over the last 25 years. The main aim is to examine which regulatory instruments are used to address the growing regulatory challenges and to critically assess whether these instruments can strike a balance between the different dominant regulatory goals that are under increasing tension: the goal of stimulating innovation and competitiveness - the goal of protecting a long list of fundamental rights - and the goal of preventing foreseeable collective and societal harm.

From a meta-perspective of EU digital policy-making since 2000, EU digital policy can essentially be divided into three phases, with a fourth phase already emerging with the second von der Leyen Commission:

The first phase is characterised by a hands-off approach to digital regulation. The main legal framework of this phase is the 2000 E-Commerce Directive. Its dominant regulatory instruments include private sector self-regulation and a general promotion of “flexible regulatory approaches”. The second phase can be attributed to the 2016 Commission Communications on platform economies, which for the first time outlined the challenges of the so-called platform economy. The regulatory tools are defined by an expansion of sector-specific regulation, a continued promotion of "flexible regulatory tools", and a strong fundamental rights approach introduced by the GDPR. The third phase is linked to the 2020 digital strategy "Europe fit for the Digital Age". Although it promotes, besides innovation and competitiveness, the protection of fundamental rights and the prevention of societal harm, a close reading of the legal texts as well as a series of expert interviews conducted with Commission officials and stakeholders show that the main regulatory instruments differ in some cases only to a certain degree from the first phase, as they are also based on classical EU internal market law. The fourth phase is characterized by a clearer focus on the regulatory goal of "competitiveness and innovation".

The presentation of this work in progress will provide a meta-perspective on the development of EU digital policy and on the question of the extent to which a 'governance turn' is actually taking place. In addition, the fourth phase, which has not yet been researched, will be examined, based on follow-up of expert interviews as well as a study of relevant Commission communications and strategies.

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.

In its efforts to create a single market for data, the European Commission has launched various data space initiatives across all sectors of society (such as agriculture or health) that would help overcome existing technical and legal barriers to seamless data sharing. From a technical point of view, these policies are enforced by means of setting up a highly scalable and modular backend infrastructure that can be tailored to any business needs. This paper shows the importance of considering the move toward digital platform business models in the study of European interoperability, both by looking at their technicalities and performativity. Adopting a material–technical perspective on platforms as developed within media studies, and bringing this literature in conversation with Science and Technology Studies (STS) and European studies, this paper suggests that a focus on the political economy of platforms and their technical configuration is key to understand how this novel form of data integration is re-ordering power arrangements over data sharing and governance. Through a detailed study of the roll out of DG CONNECT’s open-source middleware platform “Simpl”, this paper seeks to make two broader contributions. First, it identifies a new logic of platform economy behind the implementation of EU digital policy initiatives (such as the Data Governance Act and the Data Act) that enables new decentralised practices of data sharing and use to emerge across the public and private sectors. Second, it draws out how this new logic is accompanied not only by the coopting of platforms as “services” but also crucially by a breakdown of the categories of data provider/consumer, owner/user.