Digitalisation & Technological Innovation in Europe: Impact on Core Values, Regulation & Enforcement

Digitalization & technological innovation in Europe

The RENFORCE Building Block on Digitalisation & Technological Innovation in Europe is a sub-group within the RENFORCE research centre at Utrecht University. We deal with digitalisation and technological innovation at the intersection of different domains in EU law, including EU internal market law, competition law, data protection law, consumer law and financial markets law.

The speed of technological change and innovation raises the question of whether and how the law can and should keep pace with technological development and be future-proof. The aim of this Building Block is to analyse and understand the effects of digital technologies and innovation on basic principles of the law and on core values, along with the needs this phenomenon creates for regulation and enforcement. In this context specific attention is paid to the fact that in relation to digitalisation the lines between different domains in EU law are increasingly blurring. In particular, this raises questions as to the relationship between traditional fields of EU law (such as competition law and consumer law) and more broadly applicable digitalisation laws such as the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act and the AI Act.

Joint research projects

Apart from our individual research (see the personal UU webpages of our members), we also regularly engage in joint projects. For example:

in 2024 four of our researchers joint forces to publish on Meta’s “pay or okay” subscription model for Facebook and Instagram, analysing it from different legal perspectives (i.e. competition law, data protection law and consumer law);
in 2022 and 2023 we worked on a joint project on future-proofing EU regulation and enforcement for the digitalised age, with a conference in Utrecht on 4 November 2023 and the publication of a special section in European Papers in the Autumn of 2023.

Research meetings

Our Building Block regularly organises research meetings. For example, we recently organised:

the Winter Seminar Series on digitalisation and EU law (four meetings in January and February 2024). In these meetings we discussed the CJEU Meta case (C-252/21), the Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act and the AI Act from different EU legal perspectives;
a seminar the intersection between competition law and the DMA in the context of the principle of ne bis in idem, by Veerle Peters and Malgorzata Kozak (April 2024);
a multidisciplinary PhD Conference on Digital Labour Platforms (organised by Anne Joppe and Gabriël van Roosmalen, in cooperation with PlatWork-R and Governing the Digital Society).

If you are at Utrecht University and interested to join these meetings, please contact the coordinators of the Building Block. Please also feel free to reach out to us if you a researcher (at Utrecht University of elsewhere) and interested in presenting at one of our research meetings.