Sleight of hand
Will some tricks stop working once they are seen?
Hello, dear reader, and welcome to another issue of AI, Law, and Otter Things! It has been almost three weeks since the latest newsletter, and quite a bit has happened around the world. The new US presidency continues its speedrun of Empire Collapse Simulator 2025, people were astounded with the latest AI product coming out of China, the EU proposed a funding package for defence with a very unfortunate logo…and the Dutch universities are starting strike action against the cuts proposed by their government. All in all, everything happens so much.
On a lighter note, Bayern Munich somehow dismantled Bayer Leverkusen in the Champions League to the point that the latter failed to capitalize on Bayern’s embarrassing result on Saturday. And we now have a video of Rick Astley singing “Pink Pony Club”, so that’s it for wrapping up the world before the newsletter itself.
Today I am going to continue the discussion of global regulation from recent issues, speculating about how a few theorized mechanisms might play out in the future. After that, I will share a few reading recommendations and opportunities, before wrapping up with a lovely otter. This will be a short issue, but hopefully it will have something of interest.
Policy spoilers
One of the classic debates on Al Gore’s internet concerns the question of whether “spoilers” of works of fiction are acceptable. I, for one, am solidly in the pro-spoiler camp: not caring much about detective and horror stories, my opinion is that a story that would be ruined by knowing more about the plot outilne is not worth my time anyway. In fact, there are many things that I only watched/read/listened to/whatever because I saw something about the plot that got me curious about how that plot point would be executed. Yet, as pointed above, there are some things that are somewhat ruined once you know about what is coming. Arguably, this is the case of some policy instruments.
Take, for instance, the European Union’s outsized influence in global regulation. Over the past few decades, Brussels has largely stumbled into a position where its legal approach to domains such as the environment, personal data, or the safety of consumer goods was seen as a worldwide standard, both by companies and by jurisdictions that replicated EU norms locally. Various mechanisms have been proposed to explain this phenomenon, including the notorious Brussels Effect, leading to a growth in the volume and theoretical substance of discussions about the EU’s role in shaping regulatory agendas and instruments. From the perspective of EU soft power, the results of this increased awareness have been mixed at best.
On the one hand, having a better view of its influence allowed the EU to actively wield it as an instrument in the international scale. For example, the European Commission’s 2021 communication on fostering an European approach to AI explicitly mentions an ambition of not only regulating AI within the EU single market but claiming global leadership in regulation. To some extent, this instrumentalization of the EU’s unilateral influence has been successful: I don’t think I have seen a single AI regulatory proposal that has not been described as “influenced by” the AI Act, even it turns out to be quite different in practice.
On the other hand, making this phenomenon visible has also weakened it somehow. Part of this dilution comes from greater awareness about the friction that one might see when uncritically transplanting EU approaches to other legal frameworks. For all my critiques of the Brazilian AI bill, for instance, it explicitly avoids the excessive focus on technical properties of AI systems that undermines the AI Act as a fundamental rights instrument.
The EU’s influence is also weakened by active resistance, which can be seen for instance in discourses about digital sovereignty in global majority countries or Trump’s presidential instructions equating some forms of regulation with the “extortion” of American tech companies. Between friction and resistance, I would venture that EU policies will have a harder time in becoming global standards than they had when there was less awareness about European unilateral influence in regulation.
The next few years are also likely to be interesting1 for another darling in politics: the notion of weaponized interdependence. As Abe Newman and Henry Farrell, among others, have shown, the dynamics of digitalization over the last few decades have created a situation in which the United States hold an outsized level of control over critical pieces of infrastructure. See, for example, how the Ukrainian war effort relies on US technologies—not just the supplied weapons and ammo but even civilian suppliers such as Starlink and Maxar. This degree of control allows the US to pressure other countries when needed.
However, just like above, the increased visibility of these tools of influence has been pushing other international actors—including until-now American allies such as Canada and the EU—to look for alternatives. It remains to be seen whether these countries will successfully divest themselves from US-centric infrastructure, or even if the issue will remain salient for long enough in their internal politics to ensure concrete measures in this regard. If that is the case, then we will have seen another case in which the policymaker’s toolkit has been spoiled.
Recommendations
As usual, I would like to begin with a little bit of self-promotion. Are you interested in the potential for global diffusion of the EU’s approach to AI, but not enough to read one of my longer texts? I have just the thing for you: a short article (2000-ish words) in the Network Law Review.
As for writings by other people, here are some pieces that might be of interest to you:
Catrien CJH Bijleveld, Research Methods for Empirical Legal Studies: An Introduction (Eleven 2023).
Solveig Bjørkholt, ‘Presenting the StanDat Database on International Standards: Improving Data Accessibility on Marginal Topics’ [2025] Political Science Research and Methods 1.
Claire A Dunlop and others, ‘Policy Learning and Policy Innovation: Interactions and Intersections’ (2024) 52 Policy & Politics 547.
Urs Gasser and Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, ‘On the Shoulders of Others: The Importance of Regulatory Learning in the Age of AI’ (2024) 28 Virginia Journal of Law and Technology.
Chiara Libiseller, ‘“Hybrid Warfare” as an Academic Fashion’ (2023) 46 Journal of Strategic Studies 858.
Christian Brown Prener and Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen, ‘Citizenship as Legal Infrastructure’ (2024) 25 German Law Journal 1290.
Paula Rossi, Sanna Tuurnas and Jari Stenvall, ‘Street-Level Bureaucrats as Policymakers in the Implementation of Information System in Social Services’ (2025) 27 Public Management Review 702.
Finally, you might want to take a look at the recent TV show Paradise, especially if you are into [spoiler about genre moved to the footnotes].2 There was also that Netflix show about cybersecurity but I couldn’t bring myself to move past episode 1, even with De Niro.
Opportunities
We (the cyber policy team at the University of Luxembourg) are hosting Vagelis Papakonstantinou (VUB) for a Phish & Chips talk on “The Regulation of Digital Technologies in the EU: Act-ification, GDPR Mimesis and EU Law Brutality at Play”. Join us on 14 March at 12:30 CET, either in person or online. The event is free, but registration is needed, as we also host a cold lunch at 12:00 for in-person attendants.
The NOVA Platform for European Administrative and Regulatory Law (NOVA PEARL) is an innovative knowledge centre which aims to understand the various facets of the transformations EU administrative law and regulation are undergoing. I am honoured to be a part of its advisory board, and you should check out what the group has in stock. Fortunately, there is a perfect opportunity for that: NOVA PEARL will host its inaugural event on 14 March at 15:00 CET. Participation is free but requires registration.
Utrecht University is hosting a Summer School on “Global Power and Technology: Competition, Innovation and Technological Advancement through Standardization in the EU”. Seize the opportunity to learn from a team of academic and policy teachers led by the amazing Olia Kanevskaia. The school will take place from 7 to 11 July 2025, and applications are open until 27 April.
On 10 June 2025, yours truly will lead a workshop in Paris on the implications of the EU AI Act for procurement. Have you ever wondered whether and how you should care about this new piece of legislation in the context of public procurement? Come find out with me! This workshop is part of a week-long summit by Norhcon featuring scholars and practitioners, and if you have an interest in procurement there is no way you should miss the opportunity to learn from (among others) Albert Sanchez-Graells.
If you are working on competition law, you might be interested in the Early Career Scholars Conference on Innovations and the “Revamping” of Competition law. The event will take place on 6-7 November 2025 in Florence, and they accept submissions until 20 May.
And now, the otter
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From an academic perspective, of course, which usually means “awful” in terms of lived experiences.
Post-apocalyptic fiction about billionaire survivalists and how it can go wrong.