Series/Report no.:
31st European Conference of the International Telecommunications Society (ITS): "Reining in Digital Platforms? Challenging monopolies, promoting competition and developing regulatory regimes", Gothenburg, Sweden, 20th - 21st June 2022
Abstract:
In the wake of the 'new governance' school of thought, the EU has increasingly relied on soft law instruments that include a large number of (non-political) stakeholders into the policy process. Codes of conduct are such instruments. They have traditionally been used in EU law in a wide but inconsistent variety of ways. This makes it hard to summarise their legal characteristics. However, a clearer picture emerges in the sub-field of EU personal data protection. The question then becomes whether the use of codes in articles 40-41 GDPR presents a paradigm shift in how codes are used in EU law. Although embedding codes within the EU's hard law instruments is not new, this contribution argues that GDPR codes display unique features across their functional dimensions (implementation, accountability, and enforcement) and the dimensions of legalisation (obligation, precision, and delegation). The paper ends by framing these findings within the larger context of increasingly 'hard' EU soft law and the specific phenomenon of 'GDPR mimesis' in the EU's ICT policy.
