Platform Law as EU Law

Abstract

Digital platforms have become the subject of several legal acts within a relatively short period of time. The emerging European platform law faces particular challenges due to three specificities of platforms. First, the area to be regulated consists of the same platforms operating throughout the Union with a more or less uniform service in all Member States and beyond the Union. Second, the fact that the platforms can be used for almost unlimited purposes, whereas the Union does not have unlimited regulatory powers. Third, there is the dynamic development of the platform economy, which constantly presents us with new phenomena and potential risks, giving operators a knowledge advantage over regulators and generating a need for private ordering by platforms themselves. In this combination, the legal challenges differ from the issues addressed by most other acts of the EU Digital Strategy: for example, the Data Governance Act focuses not on private but on public data owners, while the Data Act focuses on Internet of Things applications, which are not used as ubiquitously as digital platforms. Because of these particularities, an overarching view of the phenomena of platform regulation helps to provide a background against which the appropriateness of individual norms can be assessed. In order to structure the observations, the platform phenomenon will first be contrasted with that of the EU (I.), before the characteristics of platform law as supranational law (II.) and European administrative law (III.), as well as questions of the platform-related protection of fundamental rights are addressed (IV.).