A More Coherent EU Digital Rulebook: Substantive and Institutional Issues

How to ensure coherence in EU digital regulation?

The EU’s digital rulebook has expanded rapidly in recent years, pursuing multiple objectives, from competition and innovation to consumer protection, cybersecurity, and data protection. While each objective is legitimate, together they often create tensions that are not always addressed well during the policy cycle. This contributes to legal uncertainty, regulatory complexity, and inconsistent outcomes, ultimately affecting firms’ ability to innovate and invest in Europe.

Challenges

In practice, these trade-offs are frequently left unresolved at the legislative stage and are instead managed by public authorities during implementation and enforcement.

At the substantive level, public authorities may struggle because different rules often pursue competing objectives without clearly explaining how they should be balanced. This leaves firms uncertain about how to comply and how regulators will interpret trade-offs, for example, between openness and security or between data protection and data-driven innovation.

At the institutional level, the growing number of authorities involved in digital regulation has created a fragmented landscape. Co-ordination across regulators, both across Member States and across policy domains, remains uneven, increasing the risk of duplication, inconsistent decisions, and reduced regulatory predictability.

Policy directions

Addressing these issues requires action across the regulatory lifecycle. At the legislative stage, there is a need to better identify and confront policy trade-offs upfront, supported by stronger and more dynamic impact assessments. At the enforcement stage, improving co-operation between regulators can help ensure more consistent and predictable outcomes. More broadly, moving towards more principles-based and outcomes-focused approaches can provide greater flexibility to manage competing policy objectives.

A window of opportunity

The European Commission’s ongoing ‘digital fitness check’ offers a timely opportunity to streamline the framework and address inconsistencies. Getting this right will be critical: a more coherent rulebook can reduce uncertainty, unlock innovation, and strengthen Europe’s competitiveness.

In a complex world, trade-offs between regulatory objectives will always exist. The task for Europe is to manage them consistently while giving consumers and businesses clarity and certainty.