Digital governance faces a double risk: the vacuum, which lets the powerful do as they please, and the overload, which can regulate badly, fragment or stifle.
6.1Democracy under pressure
Coordinated manipulation, electoral deepfakes, political micro-targeting, the attention economy: the digital world changes the conditions of public debate. The effects of filter bubbles are debated by researchers, but access to platform data is becoming central.
6.2Surveillance, by the state and by the market
The Snowden legacy, spyware, facial recognition, algorithmic video surveillance and surveillance capitalism raise the same question: which exceptional measures become permanent?
6.3Private power
Terms of service that act as a constitution for billions of users, infrastructure on which states depend, private owners of global public squares: it is no longer enough to ask whether the state watches too much. We must also ask who governs the private governors.
6.4The algorithmic state gone wrong
The Dutch childcare benefits scandal and the controversies over scoring algorithms show that algorithmic administration can produce discrimination, opacity and no means of redress. Governing by algorithm requires the same guarantees as governing by law.
6.5The risks of regulation itself
- Overload and legal uncertainty: too many poorly coordinated texts can hold back innovation.
- Regulatory capture: the rules can be written by those they target.
- Fragmentation: a splinternet of incompatible blocs can emerge.
- Colliding extraterritorial laws: the CLOUD Act, the GDPR, the DSA and national laws can clash.
- Censorship: the vocabulary of online safety can be recycled by authoritarian regimes.
6.6The rules as a geopolitical battlefield
Since 2025, European digital regulation has become an explicit transatlantic trade issue. Standards are instruments of power, and therefore targets.
Going further: the library
French-language books and reports
Apocalypse cognitive
Gérald Bronner
The attention market and the deregulation of information.
Les ingénieurs du chaos
Giuliano da Empoli
The political machinery of disinformation.
Technopolitique
Asma Mhalla
Technology as a total fact of power.
Culture numérique
Dominique Cardon
The foundation for understanding what we regulate.
La civilisation du poisson rouge
Bruno Patino
The attention economy.
International books
The Brussels Effect / Digital Empires
Anu Bradford
How Europe regulates the world.
Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace
Lawrence Lessig
The founding text.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Shoshana Zuboff
The Tech Coup
Marietje Schaake
Taking back democratic control.
Weapons of Math Destruction
Cathy O’Neil
Algorithmic opacity.
Sources
Ruling of the Romanian Constitutional Court; the French Defender of Rights on digitisation of public services; Corporate Europe Observatory; Draghi report.
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