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#Tech, Media & Telecom

A Framework for Aligning Business Incentives to Protect Children Online

  • October 6, 2026
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Read the Publication "A Framework For Aligning Business Incentives To Protect Children Online"

Protecting Children Online: Tackling Harms at Their Root Through Business Incentives

Digital services offer children real opportunities to learn, create, connect and build digital skills, but these benefits come with significant risks. Much of the current debate focuses on banning children from social media or prohibiting specific design features such as infinite scroll, autoplay or loot boxes. This new CERRE Report from Academic Co-Director Jan Krämer, CERRE researcher Michèle Ledger and Sonja Hermann proposes a different approach.

Realigning incentives with child safety

Rather than cataloguing harmful features one by one, the report traces online harms to children back to their root cause: the business and financial incentives that drive providers’ design choices. The more revenue a service earns from a risk-inducing feature, the stronger its incentive to tolerate the resulting harm. Regulating features without addressing these incentives risks becoming a game of whack-a-mole.Building on the OECD’s typology of children’s online risks, the report identifies seven business model dimensions that shape a service’s risk profile: reliance on usage duration, opaque monetisation, harmful content, user-generated content, inter-user interaction, personal data collection, and experimental technologies such as generative AI. On that basis, the report shows the most risky business model. The report also shows that risks accumulate across the whole access chain, from device to intermediary to end-service. Control functions such as age verification are therefore best placed as far upstream as possible.

A new legal approach

Today’s EU rules, including the DSA, AVMSD, GDPR and UCPD, tackle these issues only piece by piece. The recently proposed EU Kids Act also introduces dedicated rules for minors, requiring safe-by-default design for a defined set of services considered high-risk. The report looks beyond specific service categories to the business incentives behind risky design, and offers a framework that can also capture new types of services as they emerge.
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Jan Krämer (2)
Jan Krämer
Academic Co-Director
and University of Passau

Jan Krämer is an Academic Co-Director at CERRE and a Professor at the University of Passau, Germany, where he holds the chair of Internet & Telecommunications Business.

Previously, he headed a research group on telecommunications markets at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), where he also obtained a diploma degree in Business and Economics Engineering with a focus on computer science, telematics and operations research, and a Ph.D. in Economics, both with distinction.

He is editor and author of several interdisciplinary books on the regulation of telecommunications markets and has published numerous articles in the premier scholarly journals in Information Systems, Economics, Management and Marketing research on issues such as net neutrality, data and platform economy, and the design of electronic markets.

Professor Krämer has served as academic consultant for leading firms in the telecommunications and Internet industry, as well as for governmental institutions, such as the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and the European Commission.

His current research focuses on the role of data for competition and innovation in online markets and the regulation of online platforms.

Jan Krämer is an Academic Co-Director at CERRE and a Professor at the University of Passau, Germany, where he holds the chair of Internet & Telecommunications Business.

Previously, he headed a research group on telecommunications markets at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), where he also obtained a diploma degree in Business and Economics Engineering with a focus on computer science, telematics and operations research, and a Ph.D. in Economics, both with distinction.

He is editor and author of several interdisciplinary books on the regulation of telecommunications markets and has published numerous articles in the premier scholarly journals in Information Systems, Economics, Management and Marketing research on issues such as net neutrality, data and platform economy, and the design of electronic markets.

Professor Krämer has served as academic consultant for leading firms in the telecommunications and Internet industry, as well as for governmental institutions, such as the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and the European Commission.

His current research focuses on the role of data for competition and innovation in online markets and the regulation of online platforms.

Portrait of Michele Ledger, CERRE Research Fellow and CRIDS Research Centre of the University of Namur
Michèle Ledger
Research Fellow
and Head of Practice, Cullen International and Research Centre in Information, Law and Society (CRIDS), University of Namur

Michèle Ledger is a researcher at the Research Centre in Information, Law and Society (CRIDS) of the University of Namur where she also lectures on the regulatory aspects of online platforms at the postmaster degree course. She has been working for more than twenty years at Cullen International and leads the company’s Media regulatory intelligence service.

Michèle Ledger is a researcher at the Research Centre in Information, Law and Society (CRIDS) of the University of Namur where she also lectures on the regulatory aspects of online platforms at the postmaster degree course. She has been working for more than twenty years at Cullen International and leads the company’s Media regulatory intelligence service.

Sonja Herrmann
Sonja Herrmann
Ph.D. Researcher in Information Systems
University of Passau

Sonja Herrmann is a Ph.D. student in Information Systems at the Chair for Internet & Telecommunications Business and in the DFG-funded Research Training Group Digital Platform Ecosystems, both at the University of Passau, Germany. Prior to that she completed her studies with a master’s degree in business administration also at the University of Passau. In her research she focuses on the intersection between digital platform monetisation, behavioural design and consumer protection, especially in the context of video game design mechanics.

Sonja Herrmann is a Ph.D. student in Information Systems at the Chair for Internet & Telecommunications Business and in the DFG-funded Research Training Group Digital Platform Ecosystems, both at the University of Passau, Germany. Prior to that she completed her studies with a master’s degree in business administration also at the University of Passau. In her research she focuses on the intersection between digital platform monetisation, behavioural design and consumer protection, especially in the context of video game design mechanics.

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