Regulation of Digital Technologies in the EU

Vagelis Papakonstantinou is Professor of Personal Data Protection Law at the Faculty of Law & Criminology of the Free University of Brussels (VUB, Vrije Universiteit Brussel), focusing on cybersecurity, intellectual property and the broader topic of technology regulation. He works through the Cyber and Data Security Lab, for which he is the scientific coordinator, as well as through VUB’s Research Group on Law Science Technology & Society (LSTS) and the Brussels Privacy Hub.Paul de Hert is Professor at the Faculty of Law & Criminology at the VUB and an associate professor at the Law School/Tilburg Institute for Law and Technology (TILT), University of Tilburg. He is Director of the VUB’s Research Group on Human Rights, Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Law & Criminology, and a former director of the LSTS and of the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Law.

• Acknowledgements viiList of abbreviations viii1 Introduction 1PART 1The change of paradigm in the EU’s regulation of digital technologies: ‘act-ification’ at play 132 Popular names instead of alphanumeric titles for EU laws regulating digital technologies 153 The titles of EU legal acts 224 Is act-ification useful? 28PART 2‘GDPR mimesis’ in (all?) EU regulatory initiatives related to digital technologies 395 ‘GDPR mimesis’: has the success of the GDPR dulled the EU legislator’s imagination? 416 The EU data protection model and its embodiment in the GDPR 547 Is GDPR mimesis useful for the regulation of digital technologies? 64PART 3The ‘brutality’ of EU legislation on new digital technologies 718 The ‘regulatory brutality’ of EU law when regulating digital technologies 739 Basic principles of EU law and the regulation of digital technologies 8510 Why is regulatory brutality a problem when regulating digital technologies in the EU? 95PART 4A new paradigm for EU law 10511 The current reality of digital technologies in Europe 10712 The European way for the digital age 120Index 135