The Digital Services Act and the climate emergency

Description

There is extensive research highlighting the environmental impacts of emerging technologies like AI, and of the technology industry generally. However, in the field of law (with limited recent exceptions) there has been little research exploring how these impacts should be factored into platform regulation. This is a serious oversight, because the EU (like other jurisdictions around the world) is currently passing a series of legislative reforms that will shape the business practices and environmental impacts of the platform economy for years to come.

Against this background, our work-in-progress paper aims to interrogate the role of dominant platforms in contributing to – or mitigating – environmental risks and to situate European debates around platform regulation in the context of the climate emergency. We highlight concrete links between climate policy and technology regulation through a legal analysis of the EU’s 2022 Digital Services Act (DSA). In particular, we focus on three sets of provisions from Chapter III Section 5 DSA: those on systemic risk assessment and mitigation, research data access, and the crisis response mechanism. These provisions apply to platforms and search engines with over 45 million EU users – those which exercise the most power over the broader economy and information environment, and which therefore represent particularly important targets for regulatory intervention. We highlight the DSA's potential as a regulatory lever to reduce the environmental impacts of the platform economy, but also raise concerns that it could be used to suppress vital political debates and climate activism.

About the speakers

Ilaria Buri is a research fellow at the “DSA Observatory” at the Institute for Information Law (IViR), University of Amsterdam. Her current research focuses on questions of trade secrets and research data access, and on the implementation and enforcement of the DSA systemic risk provisions. She is one of the organisers of the “EU Platform Regulation” summer course - also addressed to regulators and practitioners - which was held for the first time in July 2023.

Rachel Griffin is a PhD candidate and lecturer at Sciences Po Law School. Her research focuses on how EU platform regulation (in particular the DSA) addresses social inequalities and discrimination in the context of social media.

About this conference

The conference takes place in Room J208 (13 Rue de l’Université, 75007 Paris) - In person & online.