Digital Rights

Legislation governing digital technology and services has changed a lot over the last five years due to increasing concerns about the power and adverse influence of Big Tech. The concerns are well known, including issues with privacy, content and monopoly power; what is perhaps less clear is how to get the best out of the different initiatives and to ensure that they are not undermining each other.

This paper outlines the main types of emerging digital regulation in the UK and the EU, characterises some of their interactions, and comments upon capacities needed for coherent strategies for digital policy.

The highly technical and quickly evolving nature of the digital industry requires significant regulatory capacity. It also requires significant global co-operation, as the harms that emerge online often cross borders and are linked to entities that are partly or entirely located outside of the jurisdiction where the harm occurs. This paper analyses both the One-Stop-Shop in the General Data Protection Regulation (often called "UK GDPR") and the Proposed EU AI Act and Standardisation.

This paper analyses the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA), which imposes a set of specific ex ante obligations on the largest digital players, including  interoperability and data access. It also analyses the UK's Digital Markets Unit (DMU), and whether it could be designed as a more flexible set of regulatory tools enabling a targeted approach to identifying emerging competition issues and market power in the digital field.

This paper outlines the policy background that has taken the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and the UK’s Online Safety Bill down their respective legislative journeys and examines how law-makers have responded to the policy challenges in each jurisdiction, and highlights some important differences in the legislative approach.

Post Brexit, the UK and EU’s rules on digital monopolies are diverging. Both understand the consequences of digital monopoly power, whether that is in online harms (behaviour online which may hurt a person physically or emotionally), abuses of privacy, or boosting of profits at the expense of smaller rivals and business customers. However, competition policy in both jurisdictions has lagged behind the changes that digitisation has brought to many industries. This post considers the diverse interventions in the EU and the UK that attempt to address digital monopoly power, namely the new EU Digital Markets Act (DMA) and of the UK Competition and Markets Authority.

The UK Government has indicated its desire to diverge from the European data protection regime. This brief considers some of the main areas of divergence in the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill (DPDI Bill), the latest iteration of an effort to reform data protection to "free up the use of data" to "unleash its value across the economy" and for the UK to "operate as the world's data hub."

The publication of the post-Brexit UK Data Protection and Digital Information Bill (Data Reform Bill) in July 2022 signalled the UK Government’s intention to diverge from European data protection law in several critical areas. This blog post analyses this regulatory divergence and their potential implications, not only for UK-EU trade and relations, but also data subjects’ rights.

The differing approaches to the regulation of big tech in the UK and EU highlight some crucial questions for law-makers in both jurisdictions. The EU’s Digital Services Act and the UK’s Online Safety Bill both tackle the need to restrict certain content online and create a framework for regulating online platforms. The measures affect the underlying fundamentals of Internet services in very different ways, which could impact their operation across borders. This blog post considers how current policy choices in these two laws may influence future policy directions and ultimately the whole Internet ecosystem.