The European University Institute (EUI) invites you to the workshop “Collaborative Regulation in the Digital Economy: Institutional Challenges”. Within the EUI, the event is organised jointly by the Florence Competition Programme (FCP) and the Florence School of Regulation, Communications and Media (FSR C&M).

The event aims to gather officials from national competition and various regulatory authorities as well as from EU institutions to discuss institutional challenges raised by the growing interaction of competition policy and regulation in relation to digital platforms.

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Background

Horizontal cooperation between different national authorities is by no means a new phenomenon. For decades now, competition authorities have been collaborating with regulatory authorities in sectors such as telecommunications and post, energy, or banking. However, as the digital economy disrupted many sectors, posing a whole new set of challenges, it has also revealed potential deficiencies of competition law, which in turn has led to the adoption of new regulatory proposals, such as the new Digital Markets Act (DMA) and Digital Services Act (DSA). This means that, as previously telecom or energy operators, now digital platforms will be subject to increased interaction between competition law and sectoral regulation as well as other policies (such as data protection).

Increased interaction between competition law, sectoral regulation and other policies can certainly help ensure a more holistic regulatory response, but it can also create frictions. Such frictions are most likely to arise with respect to enforcement and monitoring in case ex-ante regulation, which has been the main domain of sectoral regulators, with respect to digital platforms would be entrusted to competition authorities. Frictions are naturally less likely to arise if different authorities join forces to increase their impact in a competition advocacy role. It is, therefore, necessary to understand institutional challenges and inefficiencies caused by potential conflicts in order to build institutional collaboration that would tap on the collective expertise.

To this aim, the workshop features different stakeholders and consists of two roundtables. The first roundtable will focus on the collaboration between competition, telecom and data protection authorities, and the challenges it poses. The second roundtable, in turn, will examine the demand for data, AI and the creation of new data units within competition and regulatory authorities.

 

Panel 1

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Panel 2

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Practical information

The workshop will take place online and will be broadcasted via Zoom. Participation in the event is free of charge. However, prior online registration is required in order to receive the Zoom credentials.