Europe’s Digital Agenda: Is the AI Act the Final Act?

Over the past five years the European Union legislature has passed a flurry of ambitious directives and regulations dealing with various aspects of Europe’s digital economy: the Digital Single Market (DSM) Directive (2019), the Open Data Directive (2019), the Data Governance Act (2022), the Digital Services Act (2022), the Digital Market Act (2022), the Data Act (2023) and the AI Act (2024).

While these legal instruments touch upon different legal domains, ranging from intellectual property law, freedom of government information and data protection to media regulation, competition law, and consumer protection, there is considerable overlap – and increasing confusion about their reach and scope, the new governance structures they establish, and their underlying policies.

It introduces a ban on high-risk AI technologies, establishes far reaching transparency measures, demands human oversight, prohibits misleading uses of AI, creates new supervisory authorities, and enhances protection of human creators against being “trained” by large language models (LLMs).

This international conference – the first of its kind – searches for common principles and doctrines in Europe’s Digital Agenda, and queries what will be the EU’s next step – if any – in its regulatory adventure in the digital field. It will also compare Europe’s Digital Agenda to developments in the United States and look at the impact of the new European rules on enterprises in the ICT sector in Europe, particularly start-ups.

See the full programme here.