The Geopolitical Union and Tech Governance: Regulatory Mercantilism and the Restructuring of Digital Europe

When Commission President von der Leyen announced the birth of the Geopolitical Union in 2023, she declared areorientation of the Commission’s approach to external partnerships. As old alliances appeared to crumble, and new threats appeared on the horizon, Europe’s ostensible trust in the stability and dependency of the liberal international order was replaced with a growing sense of vulnerability in a multicentric, hostile world. From data centres to AI to content regulation to electric vehicles, the EU is positioned as trying to catch up to more technologically advanced rivals. With this came a shift in discourse used to describe Europe’s challenges, with the incorporation of terms such as ’sovereignty’, ’strategic autonomy’, and ‘dependencies’ moving from the narrow domain of security and defence into the general lexicon of governance.

This keynote expands on these shifts, and what they mean for Europe’s tech governance in an increasingly febrile geopolitical environment. I argue that the underlying rationale of regulation, particularly in strategic fields such as digital, energy, and environment, is characterised by ‘regulatory mercantilism’. Within regulatory mercantilism, the logic of regulatory interventions becomes predicated not on economic efficiencies, or governance by and through private sector actors on the basis of presumed expertise. Instead, regulatory intervention becomes characterised by concerns over geopolitical instability or perceived threat, where external dependency is framed as vulnerability, and Europe’s sovereignty reinforced by guaranteeing strategic autonomy. In this respect, certain hallmarks of historical mercantilism are present. Instead of ‘economy’ and ’security’ being potential trade-offs in regulating a given technology, they are instead mutually constituent, with achieving one helping to achieve the other. Regulation increasingly becomes used for industrial policy at home, while exporting regulatory approaches, norms, and values abroad.

Within this framework, it is important to take a more holistic approach to understanding European tech governance, particularly vis à vis relations with China and the United States, and placing them within the broader geopolitical and geostrategic contexts in which Europe finds itself. It requires us not to look at individual technologies or legislative initiatives in isolation, but to understand the interrelation between technologies and legislative interventions across domains. It requires us not to consider ‘digital’ as something separate and distinct, but something that blurs the lines between the intangible and the material. And it requires us to recognise that geography matters, and despite notions of the free flow of information and the borderless nature of digital technologies and communications, questions of ‘where’ technology is based, and ‘who’ controls it, become central to contemporary technology governance.’

Data protection law as gender performance

Gender is one of the most significant informational categories in our societies. And while gender is generally experienced as intrinsically and deeply connected to our identity, data about gender proliferate nowadays in ways that tend to partially escape us. In addition of being assigned a gender at birth, and typically having some gender marker in official documents, we are more and more often algorithmically assigned a gender without necessarily having been informed about it, for instance while using online platforms or confronted with cameras. Data protection law being, in principle, the ultimate tool for us to somehow understand, control or negotiate what happens to our personal data, it should logically emerge as a privileged instrument for us to comprehend and perhaps perform our gender. But is data protection law actually fit for such purpose, in theory and/or in practice? This talk will critically inquire into these premises and questions.

The false choice between digital regulation and innovation

In her keynote, Professor Bradford will challenge the common view that more stringent regulation of the digital economy inevitably compromises innovation and undermines technological progress. This view, vigorously advocated by the tech industry, has shaped the public discourse in the United States, where the country’s thriving tech economy is often associated with a staunch commitment to free markets. U.S. lawmakers have also traditionally embraced this perspective, which explains their hesitancy to regulate the tech industry to date. The European Union has chosen another path, regulating the digital economy with stringent data privacy, antitrust, content moderation, and other digital regulations designed to shape the evolution of the tech economy toward European values around digital rights and fairness. According to the EU’s critics, this far-reaching tech regulation has come at the cost of innovation, explaining the EU’s inability to nurture tech companies and compete with the United States and China in the tech race.

Bradford argues that the association between digital regulation and technological progress is considerably more complex than what the public conversation, U.S. lawmakers, tech companies, and several scholars have suggested to date. For this reason, the existing technological gap between the United States and the EU should not be attributed to the laxity of American laws and the stringency of European digital regulation. Instead, there are more foundational features of the American legal and technological ecosystem that have paved the way for U.S. tech companies’ rise to global prominence—features that the EU has not been able to replicate to date. By severing tech regulation from its allegedly adverse effect on innovation, Bradford directs governments deliberating tech policy away from a false choice between regulation and innovation while drawing their attention to a broader set of legal and institutional reforms that are necessary for tech companies to innovate and for digital economies and societies to thrive.

Controlling Malicious Misuse of AI Across the Stack

When organised crime runs global romance scams powered by deepfaked phonecalls and automated messages; when online groups use stolen API keys to generate intimate abuse images from advanced models and share them widely; when malicious individuals use downloadable models to plan physical and cyberattacks; when child sexual abuse rings generate on-device, fine-tuned model plugins of images of real, abused children to share instead of the images themselves — who you gonna call? And what are the consequences of calling them? Most discussions of AI safety and security focus on distant, imaginary harms, but real tools are being misused today in ways that are very difficult for the upstream designers of these tools to stop. In this talk, I will outline the different intervention points across the technology stack to attempt to stop malicious misuse, and the different technological middlemen which might serve as regulatory chokepoints — operating systems, CDNs, model marketplaces, cloud providers, communications platforms, hardware manufacturers, and more. AI forces us to confront difficult choices about the future, and malicious misuse of AI tools, and the need to respond to these uses, endangers the last few remnants of the open Internet. This work is based on a forthcoming book project coauthored with Robert Gorwa at WZB Berlin.