In 2012 Anu Bradford published an article on ‘The Brussels Effect’ which was followed by her book ‘The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World’. The concept of the Brussels Effect has captured the imagination of academics and policy makers, and been influential in shaping our shared understanding about the contrasting regulatory approaches of the EU and US to ecommerce, to the internet more generally, and now to AI. In this talk I will argue that although Bradford’s thesis seems to fairly synthesise the Europeanisation of the global regulation of the tech industry, it in fact hides a deeply political agenda: after all, who is Europe to dictate to the world (which really means the US) how to regulate its industry. The implicit political challenge underlying the ‘Brussels Effects’ thesis appears to align well with a much broader and older critique of Europe’s hegemony and its projection of power throughout the world. Martti Koskenniemi, Bradford’s landsman, for example, critiqued international law as a profoundly European project under the guise of universalism: ‘One can do international law better or worse, but the criteria of excellence have been set by Europeans: Cicero and Roman law, Catholic intellectuals, Vitoria in the sixteenth or Louis le Fur in the twentieth century, protestant activists, Hugo de Groot in the seventeenth, or Johann Caspar Bluntschli in the nineteenth century…. None of these men thought of Europe in merely local terms, but generalized it into a representative of the universal. The principle of generalization may have changed: Roman civilization (and law), Christianity, the ‘humanity’ of the Enlightenment, science and capitalism in the nineteenth, modernity in the twentieth and globalization in the twenty-first century. It is hard to tell these ideas apart. They all claim the status of an Esperanto, transcending the time and place in which they are spoken.’ (EJIL, 2005) Is the Brussels Effect simply the latest instantiation of Europe throwing its ‘civilising’ weight around the globe, once more under the pretence of speaking Esperanto? In this talk I will argue that Bradford’s thesis illegitimately piggybacks on Koskenniemi’s critique. It is US platform law (s.230 CDA) rather than EU law that has profoundly reverberated around the globe, and so EU platform regulation should be understood as a push-back against the Washington Effect.
Uta Kohl, Visiting Professor of Law and Technology, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Uta is Professor of Law and Technology at Southampton Law School. Her research interests have been broad ranging, mostly concerning governance questions of the internet - its territoriality, dominant corporate actors, (personal) data building blocks and technologies (i.e. algorithms and AI). She is interested in the intersections of disparate but related legal regimes (e.g. private and public international law; privacy and data protection), the comparative differences in law at the transnational level, and critical legal readings of developments in the law-and-technology field.1
Uta has been published widely, including the monograph Jurisdiction and the Internet (CUP, 2007, ppb 2010), the edited collections The Net and the Nation State (CUP, 2017) and Data-Driven Personalisation in Markets, Politics and Law (CUP, 2021, co-editor J. Eisler) and the textbook Information Technology Law (5th ed, 2016, co-authors Diane Rowland and Andrew Charlesworth).2
September 2023 - August 2025: Visiting Professor in Law and Technology at CUHK, Hong Kong