The digital regulatory state in Europe: Business as usual?

In the last years, various laws regulating digital markets have been adopted in the European Union. However, while rules have increased, national regulators’ resources remain scarce. Hence, many questions are emerging around the “politics of law enforcement”: how will these rules be enforced, and with what priorities? Most EU legislation on digital issues tasks independent or quasi-independent regulatory authorities with enforcement, with European regulatory networks playing a role in the process, too. The design of these regulators and their institutionalised interactions will shape national regulatory processes. Yet, we know little about how this architecture impacts the enforcement of digital regulation in practice. To fill this gap, this paper explores the institutional foundations of the digital regulatory state. To this purpose, we review the extant literature and introduce new data on digital regulators in Europe. We collect data on the national and supranational agencies and networks of agencies implementing the General Data Protection Regulation, the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act and the Artificial Intelligence Act. The data collection includes organisational features of these entities, related to their independence, accountability, capacity and discretion, drawing upon classic literature on the institutional features of independent regulatory agencies. We explore the institutional variation to identify testable hypotheses on the power distribution and politics of digital law enforcement. Particularly, we investigate institutional continuities and discontinuities with previous literature on the regulatory state and independent regulatory authorities, and theorise the implications for regulatory practices. Our main questions are: are digital regulators designed like agencies in other sectors (i.e., finance, utilities, telecommunications)? What is the relationship between national and supranational agencies and regulatory networks in the implementation of digital regulation? How do institutional features influence law enforcement in an increasingly “geopolitical” world?