Data Egalitarianism and the Digital Services Act – Seminar recording

The responsibilities of online platforms, competition and antitrust rules, the fight against illegal content and disinformation online are at the top of the European Union’s agenda. In the much anticipated Digital Services Package, the European Commission proposes new rules that will profoundly reshape the future rulebook of internet platforms on these major issues.

The Digital Services Act (DSA) Seminar Series offers an academic perspective on these developments, to unpack the complex underlying issues of this legislative package, and discuss its possible implications. Organised by the new Centre for Digitalisation, Democracy and Innovation (CD2I) at Brussels School of Governance, in collaboration with the Chair 'Fundamental Rights and the Digital Transformation' at VUB-LSTS and the Brussels Privacy Hub, this series brings together leading academic speakers, from different horizons, to present their latest research and analysis on content moderation, intermediary liabilities, competition rules and the regulation of internet platforms.

This seminar series seeks to present cutting-edge insights from research to provide an academic contribution to the important policy debates that shape the DSA negotiations. This seminar series took place in the academic year 2020-2021. Below you will find the recording of the fifth seminar in the series, on Data Egalitarianism and the Digital Services Act.

The DSA aims to address issues of speech and competition. But alongside (or underneath) these primary concerns, the DSA is also a response to growing public frustration over the inegalitarian effects of digital companies in society: economic inequality (as dominant platforms concentrate gains from their outsize market positions into the hands of the few) and social inequality (as the social relations in which people can empower or dominate, uplift or oppress one another, are increasingly materialized in digital form). Debates over the effectiveness of the DSA may gravitate to practical, empirical, and normative ones over its impact on speech and competition, but this talk will focus on its potential egalitarian effects. It will evaluate key provisions of the DSA using egalitarian theories of equal opportunity, democratic equality and distributive equality, to consider what effects the law may have in achieving an egalitarian agenda for reform. The talk will also orient its discussion around the economic incentives that drive much of the activity the DSA seeks to address: ubiquitous data collection from technology companies, to develop behavioral insights into users and exploit such insights for commercial gain.

Speaker

Salomé Viljoen is a joint postdoctoral fellow at the NYU School of Law Information Law Institute and the Cornell Tech Digital Life Initiative. She is also a former Fellow and current Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Salomé studies how the law governing digital information structures inequality in the digital economy and how alternative legal regimes may address that inequality. Her work focuses particularly on the legal theory of data governance, and how to better align legal protections of personal data with the economic processes that drive their erosion. She also studies the use of economic optimization methods in digital settings.