Rhetoric over rights: the Digital Omnibus, competitiveness and the end of European values?

  • Panel
  • Maritime
  • Thursday 21.05 — 14:15 - 15:30

Organising Institution

ULD

Germany

Unabhängiges Landeszentrum für Datenschutz (ULD) is the data protection authority of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany.
  • Academic 3
  • Business 1
  • Policy 2
The Draghi report set the European Commission in regulatory overdrive. After spending the last decade on the creation of a (more or less) ambitious legal framework, it now follows an agenda to ‘simplify’ the digital domain in the name of competitiveness. While the Commission still emphasizes European values, these have become secondary both in rhetoric and substance, as it empowers enterprises to become arbiters of fundamental rights protections. This is particularly visible with so-called Artifical Intelligence, where the Commission displays massive anxiety and invokes colonial roots when it sees the EU as losing ground in a race to the ‘frontier’ with the USA and China. This panel will consider the consequences of the digital omnibus for the protection of individuals and the current AI rush. We will consider the following questions:

Questions to be answered

  1. How can we resist and change the current narrative in academia, activism and practice?
  2. What does the Digital Omnibus reveal about whose rights the EU is willing to weaken, and how do we defend people’s rights when competitiveness becomes the overriding political priority?
  3. Is competitiveness a quality that should be pursued, and can it be achieved only through deregulation or simplification?
  4. Is the Digital Omnibus merely closing the enforcement gap by legalizing current practices?

Moderator

Felix Bieker

ULD - Germany

Dr. Felix Bieker is researcher at ULD, the data protection authority of Schleswig-Holstein, and works on infrastructures, platforms, power and progressive approaches to data protection. Felix wrote a book called "The Right to Data Protection: Individual and Structural Dimensions of Data Protection in EU Law" and co-edited a special issue of Internet Policy Review on feminist data protection.

Speaker

Maria Magierska

University of Maastricht - Netherlands

Maria is a Senior Lecturer at the European Centre on Privacy and Cybersecurity within the Maastricht University Faculty of Law. There, she teaches and co-coordinates courses in the Advanced Master in Privacy, Cybersecurity and Data Management. At the European University Institute in Florence, she is currently finishing her PhD Referees and Rambos: Enforcers of Data Protection in the European Union, focusing on the GDPR enforcement framework. Before joining the ECPC, Maria worked at NOYB – European Center for Digital Rights in Vienna, the European Parliament and the Polish Commissioner for Human Rights. She holds an LLM from the EUI (2020), a Master’s degree in law (2018) and a Bachelor’s degree in Polish philology (2017) from the University of Warsaw. Maria is a founding member of the Management Committee of the Data Protection Scholars Network. She is an editor of the Digital Constitutionalist and an EUI Digital Public Sphere Working Group member.

Speaker

Itxaso Domínguez de Olazábal

EDRi - Europe

Itxaso Domínguez de Olazábal, PhD, is a policy advisor at European Digital Rights (EDRi) and an expert in data protection and privacy, with a focus on commercial surveillance and the multidimensional virtual harms caused by online tracking. She also specialises in online freedom of expression, examining the role of security forces in content governance.