Harmful Online Choice Architecture: Principles for Effective Regulation

Dries is a lawyer and coordinator of the digital economy at the Consumer Division of the Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM). He has nearly 20 years of experience as an enforcement official in numerous economic sectors. He set up ACM’s Behavioural Insigths Team and managed the team for the first years. He has been seconded to the OECD to work on consumer policy. And he is a co-author of ACM’s Guidelines on the Protection of the Online Consumer.

Egelyn Braun is an EU official at the European Commission, currently serving as “Team Leader – Digital and Unfair Commercial Practices” in DG Justice. She has worked on EU consumer protection policy since 2016 and coordinates the Fitness Check of EU consumer law on digital fairness. She has worked on several projects related to online choice architectures, such as the Commission’s 2021 guidelines on the application of the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive and the 2022 behavioural study on dark patterns. She is an Estonian national with law degrees from Maastricht University in the Netherlands and the European University Institute in Italy.

Kasper Drazewski is a Senior Legal Officer at BEUC, responsible for its digital fairness workstreams, with a focus on reinventing consumer law for the age of digital asymmetries. Before joining BEUC, Kasper’s post-doctoral work at the European University Institute was dedicated to the development of a machine learning-powered system for protection against unfair contract terms and privacy policies through an explainable AI.

Kush Amlani is Global Competition & Regulatory Counsel at Mozilla, leading the competition work. Prior to joining Mozilla, Kush was a Senior Competition & Regulatory Lawyer at the BBC for five years, based in London. He joined the BBC from SJ Berwin LLP (later Kings & Wood Mallesons) where he worked on competition cases in sectors such as energy, media, telecoms and pharmaceuticals, including the pay-for-delay cases before the European Commission and the Court of Justice. Kush studied law at the University of Warwick and Université Montesquieu Bordeaux IV.

Matt is a senior lawyer in the EU Regulatory Team at TikTok. Matt’s role involves leading consumer regulatory compliance and implementation advice, as well as developing policy and strategy positions on all areas of consumer law and regulation. In the context of online choice architecture, Matt co-ordinates the cross-functional team advising on the full suite of UK and EU legislative instruments covering this topic.  Prior to TikTok, Matt spent over 11 years at Sky UK (part of the Comcast Group) leading the consumer legal advice across their pay-TV and highly-regulated telecommunications products.

Robin is a product director at DuckDuckGo and is based in Brussels. He has been responsible for the DuckDuckGo mobile apps for the past few years.

Amelia Fletcher CBE is a Professor of Competition Policy at the Centre for Competition Policy, University of East Anglia and co-editor of the Journal of Competition Law and Economics. She also acts as an expert witness.

She has been a Non-Executive Director at the UK Competition and Markets Authority (2016-2023), Financial Conduct Authority (2013-20) and Payment Systems Regulator (2014-20), and a member of Ofgem’s Enforcement Decision Panel (2014-2022). She has also been a member of DG Comp’s Economic Advisory Group on Competition Policy, and was a member of the Digital Competition Expert Panel, commissioned by the UK Treasury and led by Jason Furman, which reported in March 2019.

She was previously Chief Economist at the Office of Fair Trading (2001-2013), where she also spent time leading the OFT’s Mergers and Competition Policy teams. Before joining the OFT, she was an economic consultant at Frontier Economics (1999-2001) and London Economics (1993-1999).

She has written and presented widely on competition and consumer policy. In her ongoing research, Amelia has a particular interest in the implications for competition and consumer policy of behavioural economics and online markets.

Amelia has a DPhil and MPhil in economics from Nuffield College, Oxford.

Christoph Busch is Professor of Law and Director of the European Legal Studies Institute at the University of Osnabrück, Germany. He is a Fellow and Council Member of the European Law Institute (ELI) and an Affiliated Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale University. His research focuses on consumer law, platform governance and algorithmic regulation.

Alexandre de Streel is the Academic Director of the digital research programme at the Brussels think-tank Centre on Regulation in Europe (CERRE), professor of European law at the University of Namur and visiting professor at the College of Europe (Bruges) and SciencesPo Paris. He sits in the scientific committees of the Knight-Georgetown Institute (US), the European University Institute-Centre for a Digital Society (Italy) and the Mannheim Centre for Competition and Innovation (Germany).

His main research areas are regulation and competition policy in the digital economy (telecommunications, platforms and data) as well as the legal issues raised by the developments of artificial intelligence. He regularly advises the European Union and international organisations on digital regulation.

Previously, Alexandre held visiting positions at New York University Law School, the European University Institute in Florence, Panthéon-Assas (Singapore campus), Barcelona Graduate School of Economics and the University of Louvain. He also worked for the Belgian Deputy Prime Minister, the Belgian Permanent Representation to the European Union, and the European Commission. He has also been the chair of the expert group on the online platform economy, advising the European Commission.