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Designing Enforcement for the Digital Fairness Act: Lessons from the EU’s Digital Rulebook

This blog post is based on the article “Enforcement Design in EU Digital Regulation: Lessons for the Digital Fairness Act”, published in the European Journal of Risk Regulation (2026).

The European Union already possesses an extensive body of rules governing digital markets. Consumer protection law, data protection law, platform regulation, competition-inspired digital regulation, and emerging AI governance frameworks all seek to address unfair practices in the digital economy. Yet the persistence of dark patterns, manipulative interfaces, opaque personalisation systems, and exploitative design techniques raises an important question: if the rules already exist, why do enforcement gaps remain?

[REPOST] Piecing Together Market Regulation and Private Law: The Reconciliation Puzzle

We live in an age of grand challenges, from climate change and the digitalisation of markets to rising inequality. Yet legal systems struggle to respond effectively, constrained by entrenched disciplinary boundaries. Law and regulation, public and private law, and European Union (EU) law and national law often operate in separate silos, limiting meaningful dialogue. My book, Market Regulation and Private Law: The Quest for Reconciliation in European Private Law (Cambridge University Press, 2026), offers a holistic theoretical perspective on the relationship between market regulation and private law, with significant practical implications for a wide range of areas.

[REPOST] From Europe to Basque Municipalities: Multilevel Governance and Citizen Participation in the Resettlement of Refugees

The forthcoming publication by IVAP of the book From Europe to Basque Municipalities: Multilevel Governance and Citizen Participation in the Resettlement of Refugees, following its receipt of the runner-up award in the 2025 Leizaola Prize, provides an opportunity to reflect on an issue of growing legal and political importance: how to design effective, coordinated and legitimate responses to the resettlement of refugees.

The Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive: Good Intentions, Flawed Design

The EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CS3D) is one of the most ambitious regulatory experiments in recent memory. Adopted in June 2024, it transforms large corporations operating in the EU into mandatory gatekeepers of their entire supply chains, requiring them to monitor, prevent, and mitigate environmental and human rights harms not just in their own operations, but across networks of global suppliers. The stakes are enormous: climate change and human rights abuses are among the most pressing challenges of our time. Yet good intentions alone do not make good law.

The Single Market Enforcement Agenda, an example of more transparency?

Enforcement of Single Market rules and ensuring a level playing field without unjustified barriers is key in order to make the Single Market work for businesses and citizens. In January 2026 the European Commission presented its first annual Single Market enforcement agenda as part of its annual Single Market and Competitiveness Report of 2026. Although, is it a fully-fledged agenda? The actual size and content of the agenda raise some questions. What does the Commission intend and how will it live up to its initial promises? Would a more comprehensive agenda be desirable and possible and how the Commission could and should give more transparency about enforcement? After a brief description of the initial announcement of the agenda and content of the first Single Market enforcement agenda, I will discuss the last two questions. More transparency is desirable: from a democratic perspective, but also in order to focus enforcement on those areas which matter most for a well-functioning Single Market based on a dialogue between the Commission, Council of Ministers of the European Union and European Parliament.

[REPOST] Wat zijn de grootste obstakels in toezicht en handhaving?

Overtredingen van wetten en regels veroorzaken grote maatschappelijke schade: misbruik van zorggeld, schade aan het milieu en uitbuiting van werknemers. Maar de pakkans van ernstige overtredingen is laag. De Algemene Rekenkamer analyseerde 54 onderzoeken over toezicht en handhaving uit de periode 2013-2025. In de publicatie benoemt ze de vier grootste obstakels voor toezicht en handhaving en doet ze aanbevelingen.

Enforcement of insolvency and restructuring laws: a key to a competitive energy market?

Introduction

The liberalization of the energy market has introduced profound changes both to the structure and efficiency of energy supply, bringing the underpinnings of a competitive market with it. At the same time, while open to the benefits of competition in some parts of the supply chain, the new energy market has become more prone to shock in relation to price fluctuations, its structure and assurance of demand. The 2021-2023 energy crisis has demonstrated the risks of a liberalized energy market in emergency circumstances, where as a result of unprecedentedly high energy prices, substantial number of energy suppliers became insolvent and were unable to supply the market sufficiently. In response to the crisis fall-out, the Commission proposed several structural tools to reduce risk of default among energy suppliers.

The aim of this blogpost is to highlight the potential role of existing EU insolvency and restructuring laws in mitigating energy supplier default and to explore whether their omission within the current regulatory policy is a missed opportunity for more effective enforcement.

Data Sharing Regulation in Europe: Enforcement, Governance and the Future of the EU Data Economy (A new edited volume)

Data has become one of the most critical assets of the European digital economy. From artificial intelligence and platform markets to public services and industrial innovation, access to and sharing of data increasingly determine competitive dynamics, market entry, and the effectiveness of regulation. At the same time, data sharing raises complex legal questions: how to reconcile openness with the protection of personal data, trade secrets, and intellectual property; how to prevent data-driven market foreclosure; and how to ensure that regulatory interventions foster innovation rather than stifle it.

Over the past decade, the European Union has responded to these challenges with an increasingly dense—and at times fragmented—regulatory framework. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Free Flow of Non-Personal Data Regulation, and, more recently, the Data Governance Act (DGA), the Data Act (DA), and the Digital Markets Act (DMA) have profoundly reshaped the legal landscape. Together, these instruments signal a clear policy shift: data sharing is no longer merely encouraged, but in certain contexts actively mandated as a tool to promote competition, innovation, and fairness.

It is against this background that our recently published edited volume, Data Sharing Regulation in Europe (Routledge, 2025), aims to offer a systematic and enforcement-oriented analysis of the EU data-sharing regulatory landscape.

More Power to the President? The U.S. Supreme Court is Poised to Restrict Congress’ Power to Create Independent Agencies

Since 1887, (and arguably before that), the United States Congress has created regulatory agencies with a certain degree of independence from the President. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld that model as constitutional in 1935 and again in 1958, but the current Court began to chip away at it in the last two decades. The Trump Administration has now declined to defend independent agencies and the President has fired members appointed by Democratic Presidents. Now the issue is back at the Court and its conservative majority appears to be ready to overrule its precedents and declare many or most independent agencies unconstitutional. This would transfer more power to the Presidency, at Congress’s expense, at a time when many think that office has already become too powerful.

The First Steps of the Aruban Fair Trade Authority as an Antitrust Enforcer

*A conversation with Director Kross and Dr. Wessel Geursen

Earlier this year, one of the editors of eulawenforcement.com had the chance to discuss the interesting topic of the gestation of a competition authority and the challenges it faces in its first years of existence. This issue was at the core of the event ‘Competition law enforcement overseas: an interactive discussion with the Aruba Fair Trade Authority (AFTA)’, organized by the RENFORCE Building Block ‘Public Interest Ecosystems’ (PIE) at Utrecht Law School. In what follows below, we describe some of the main takeaways of our insightful conversation with the Director of the Aruban Fair Trade Authority (AFTA) Ernesto Kross and Dr. Wessel Geursen, a competition lawyer and specialist on the territorial scope of application of EU law.