Call for Papers:

Towards a Competitive Digital EU: Addressing and Overcoming the Barriers to Regulatory Effectiveness

The Draghi Report, published on September 9, 2024, examines the competitiveness of the European Union (EU), addressing both sectoral and horizontal policies. One of the key horizontal policies discussed focuses on simplifying rules, with the report noting:

“Excessive regulatory and administrative burden can hinder the competitiveness of EU companies compared to other blocs.”

Regarding the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the report highlights two significant challenges:

1. Gold-plating: The practice of Member States adding uncoordinated and additional requirements to the GDPR.
2. Lack of Consistency in Enforcement: Differences in how the GDPR is enforced across Member States.

In its second report on the application of the GDPR, the European Commission notes “[t]here is broad consensus among stakeholders, data protection authorities and Member States that, despite some challenges, the GDPR has delivered important results for individuals and businesses. The risk-based, technology-neutral approach provides strong protection for data subjects and proportionate obligations for data controllers and processors.” With this said, the report highlights that the enforcement efforts of data protection authorities are hindered by inadequate resources and deficiencies in technical and legal expertise.

Both the Draghi report and the EC report converge in their focus on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), emphasizing the need to facilitate their compliance efforts.

This call for papers seeks to critically evaluate these claims and investigate the specific obstacles impacting the GDPR and more broadly the EU’s digital rulebook’s effectiveness. Contributors are thus encouraged to delve deeper, extending their analysis beyond the GDPR when necessary to consider other components of the EU’s digital rulebook, such as eIDAS, the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the Digital Services Act (DSA), the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act, and Sectoral Data Spaces such as Health and Finance. Contributors are also invited to make concrete recommendations for addressing the challenges they identify.

Areas of Interest

Authors are invited to submit papers that address the following themes and questions:

1. Inconsistencies in Enforcement
• Which specific pillars or provisions of the GDPR and/or other chapters of the EU digital rulebook have led to inconsistent enforcement across Member States?
• Is the issue rooted in a lack of enforcement or in inconsistencies within enforcement processes or in inconsistencies in results to enforcement actions? What is the root cause of enforcement challenges? Lack of Supervisory Authorities’ resources?
• Would the proposal for a Regulation on procedural rules solve major GDPR enforcement problems?
2. Gold-Plating Effects
• Which provisions of the EU digital EU rulebook are most affected by gold-plating? Does gold plating amount to diverging interpretations by national lawmakers, regulators?
• Has uncoordinated augmentation by Member States impacted businesses and compliance efforts? If yes, how?
• Does the fragmentation arise from the gold plating effect or from diverging interpretations of the GDPR by Supervisory Authorities?
3. Sources of Regulatory Challenges
• Do the primary challenges stem from the complexity of the laws themselves or properties of digital infrastructures which dictate specific data flows? How would the emergence of a EuroStack change the picture?
• Do the primary challenges stem from the complexity of the laws themselves, or from the opacity of the technology they regulate?
• Do the primary challenges stem from of the laws themselves or organisational complexities, e.g., persisting siloes within regulated organisations, or lack of resources, e.g. for smaller operators? Is the regulatory burden asymmetric?
4. Beyond GDPR: The Commodification of Compliance
• What are the broader implications of the commodification of compliance for competition and innovation, particularly in relation to the DSA, the AI Act and other chapters of the EU digital rulebook?
5. Broader Impacts on Competitiveness
• How does legal entrepreneurship in the tech sector undermines competition?
• What could extending interoperability requirements help achieve?

Some suggestion of additional topics:

Global competitiveness of the EU digital framework: explore how EU regulations compare to the US, China, and other regions in promoting innovation and reducing regulatory barriers. How are regulatory barriers different in the EU compared to other markets? 

The impact of AI and DeepTech: address the rapid evolution of AI and DeepTech challenges, regulatory consistency and effectiveness. Explore claims such as that to address challenges with these technologies regulators must adopt agile, risk-based approaches, promote technical standards over legislation, and provide larger margin of appreciation to market supervisors.

Submission Guidelines

Submissions should offer robust analytical insights, supported by empirical evidence, including Case Law and regulators’ decisions, or theoretical frameworks. We encourage interdisciplinary approaches and welcome contributions from legal scholars, economists, technologists, and policymakers.

We will consider both full research papers and concise, well-substantiated opinion pieces.

Authors of accepted papers will be invited to present their research at a workshop organised at the beginning of 2026 to which policy makers and analysts will participate.

Optional:
Interested contributors are invited to submit an abstract (limited to 1000 words) to sophie.stalla-bourdillon@vub.be by 15 June 2025.
Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 27 June 2025.

Deadlines

• Abstract (optional): 15 June 2025
• Notification of acceptance: 27 June 2025
• Full Paper Submission: 17 October 2025
• Notification of Acceptation: 19 December 2025
• Workshop Provisional Date: 19 February 2026 

Selected Submissions

Selected submissions will be published in the Computer Law and Security Review as part of a special issue covering the topic of this call for papers.

Guest Editors

Prof. Sophie Stalla-Bourdillon, Co-Director of the Brussels Privacy Hub, VUB, Brussels

Prof. Geoffrey Aerts, Director VUB BUDA, Brussels

Prof. David Restrepo Amariles, HEC, Paris

Submission Process

Authors should submit their manuscripts to sophie.stalla-bourdillon@vub.be. Papers will undergo a peer-review process to ensure the highest standards of academic rigor and relevance.