ECIPE OCCASIONAL PAPER • 05/2022 - Leadership in European Digital Policy:

20.500.12592/1d5fd7

ECIPE OCCASIONAL PAPER • 05/2022 - Leadership in European Digital Policy:

24 Nov 2022

INTRODUCTION The way Europe makes decision about its digital polices – its digital regulations and the policies that guide how the broad digital economy integrates with the rest of the world – has been changing fundamentally in the past decade.2 With the arrival of new and prescriptive regulations of data management and digital business models, and a general ambition to advance “strategic autonomy. [...] In the past years, the EU has advanced some significant regulations on data and the digital economy – including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Digital Markets Act, to name only two – and there are new regulatory actions planned to be adopted in the near future, for instance the AI Act and the Data Act. [...] The D9+ initiative is important and this paper will make the argument that its work should expand and focus exactly on the two points raised above: expanding the scale and scope of digital technological change in the European economy while addressing risks that an over-powering regulatory approach to digital policies in Europe reduces the benefits of the digital transformation. [...] There is also a key point of unity: while EU countries have comparative advantages in some areas of the digital economy, they trail in others and need to draw on the capacities of other countries to access the best digital technologies and services in the world.9 No EU country is consistently at the frontier of all change in technology and the digital economy: they all could learn from others. [...] What could be a realistic agenda for the D9+ - aiming to raise the profile of small and mid-sized economies in the EU policy making process and establish new policies that are based on the shared economic interest of the D9+ group? The aim of this chapter is to help D9+ countries to outline basic principles and policy recommendations that could serve as the core of new policy advocacy from the D9+.
Pages
79
Published in
Belgium

Tables

All