Throw Things in the Air and See What Sticks — The EU’s Approach To Regulating Platforms and AI

As the saying goes, technology is invented in Israel, commercialized in the US and regulated in Europe. With this in mind, Europe should have a lot of experience with regulation. While this is partly true, the last major regulatory frameworks in Europe, especially the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the AI Act, are quite eclectic. The presentation explains the core elements of the regulatory concept and focuses on risk-based regulation, hybrid governance and the challenges of defining rapidly developing technologies. Using the current discussion on disinformation as an example, it will be shown that the eclectic nature of the regulations stands in the way of solving the problem.

Prof. Wolfgang Schulz is director of the Leibniz Institute of Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut (HBI). He is also a professor for “Media Law and Public Law including Theoretical Foundations” at the Faculty of Law at Universität Hamburg. Furthermore, he was appointed director at Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society in Berlin in February 2012.

Wolfgang Schulz works on questions of communications constitutional law, media law and internet governance (with a focus on intermediaries), legal problems of algorithmic decision-making and the ethics of digitalization. He often works at the interface between law and other disciplines such as communication science and computer science and with a focus on the dimension of knowledge. He uses the functional comparison of different national approaches to solve problems. The transfer to politics at all levels (state, federal, EU, Council of Europe, UNESCO) plays an essential role in his work.