The ecosystem

Digital rules are not written by a single legislator: they result from a balance of power between institutions, companies, civil society, judges, researchers and technical bodies.

Parliaments and governments write the formal rules. At European level, the trilogues between the Parliament, the Council and the Commission are a central place of power, notably for the AI Act and its adjustments.

Regulators and judges turn texts into reality. The CNIL, the European Commission, the CJEU, competition authorities and national courts can become geopolitical actors in their own right.

The digital industry spends massively to influence the rules. Figures from Corporate Europe Observatory and LobbyControl give an order of magnitude: €151 million a year in lobbying of the European institutions, and more tech lobbyists than MEPs.

Civil society is one of the driving forces of the field: noyb, La Quadrature du Net, EDRi, AlgorithmWatch, Amnesty Tech, whistleblowers and investigative journalists have forced debates that institutions would not always have opened on their own.

Universities, think tanks, specialised administrations and the media shape the concepts that end up in laws: the Conseil d'État, Sciences Po, Institut Montaigne, AI Now, the Ada Lovelace Institute, Stanford HAI.

ISO/IEC, CEN-CENELEC, NIST, AFNOR, the IETF and W3C shape global rules without always going through parliament. Whoever sits on standardisation committees also shapes the law.