Advising on a new best practice for digital rights

Jason Pielemeier, Executive Director of the Global Network Initiative (GNI) and member of the HLEG reflects on the group’s work:

What do you hope the recommendations from this group of experts will lead to?

The process has been substantive and rewarding. As someone who does not come from Europe, it was valuable to learn from and get to know the different members of the group, the contexts in which they operate, their experiences and perspectives. These partnerships we have built will have great utility going forward.

Hopefully, the outputs that we’ve created will be useful to members of the group, to IMS partner organisations, as well as tech companies and the European Commission.

GNI are at the forefront of assessing systemic risks under the DSA. What did you recommend for HLEG’s outputs?

At GNI, we’ve been very engaged both with the Commission – as it has been developing and putting out guidance around the conduct of risk assessment by Very Large Online Platforms and Search Engines (VLOPs and VLOSEs) – as well as with tech companies and other stakeholders who have been involved with the conduct of those risk assessments. And I was trying to make sure that the outputs we were developing and the understanding that we were operating under was as informed as possible by what we know is happening in the context of the DSA.

Public versions of those risk assessments have now been released, together with the mitigations that resulted from them, as well as the audits that were conducted on the development of both the risk assessments and the mitigations. It is still early days, and we don’t have perfect insight and information as to what the companies are developing, nor do we know a lot about what the Commission expects. That said, I was trying to bring some of the insights that we do have into the HLEG process, so that whatever tools we were developing would be consistent with those emerging practices and expectations.

What value does a process such as this offer to national law makers?

I hope the outputs will help both members of HLEG and other lawmakers to have a more rounded view of both the potential and limitations of the DSA as a tool to improve the conduct of tech platforms. These are countries on a journey towards accession to the EU and once they get there they will eventually benefit from the full infrastructure of the DSA, which is still in the process of being constructed. So, they have the opportunity in the meantime to develop their own domestic approaches. In that sense, they have more flexibility and can perhaps innovate or act in ways that allow them to take advantage of emerging understandings.

I hope that our outputs will help lawmakers understand just how vital civil society is as a source of wisdom and insight when it comes to the design and development of regulation, but also to ultimately being a part of the implementation of whatever regulations emerge. One of the beneficial insights of the DSA is that it was developed as a mechanism for co-regulation, and it invites a lot of opportunities for participation from civil society. The CSO members of the HLEG were all incredibly sharp and insightful and I hope their insights will be useful in their domestic context as well as for companies working to implement the DSA.

In your view, what is the most important recommendation to lawmakers in Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia?

Taking a co-regulatory approach, building a regulatory architecture that creates space for independent experts – whether they are academics or NGOs, digital rights activists, journalists – these are all stakeholders in the true sense of the word. They have a very important stake in the future of digital technologies, they use these technologies for their own purposes, and they also sometimes suffer quite significant harms because of how those services are designed and managed. So, I think the emerging consensus not just in our expert group but more broadly in the digital rights space is that developing regulatory processes that allow for participation and flexibility is a best practice.

I hope that the governments in the countries that we’ve been focusing on will take that lesson and use it in whatever processes and regulation they may develop and, once they eventually become a part of the EU, they will also be prepared to take advantage of that community of experts as they begin implementing the DSA.

What should dominant tech companies take note of?

Tech companies are struggling to develop the internal processes that are required to comply with the DSA. Many of those companies, including those that are members of GNI, have already been doing human rights due diligence and risk assessments for many years, including as part of their commitments under the GNI. So, they are not starting from scratch, but they don’t have many insights – none of us do – as to what exactly the Commission expects those risk assessments to look like, how their consequences should be implemented, how these processes should be audited, so they are very much at the beginning of a learning curve. What I hope we can do through HLEG is help them see the value of developing these processes that allow them to be company-wide and applied not just in the EU27, but to be accordion-like and expand to efficiently address the kind of risks that we are seeing in Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine, even if those are not countries currently part of the EU.

Did you learn something new about the situation in Eastern Europe?

I’ve learned so much, it’s been really fascinating. I have benefitted from developing a more textured understanding of the realities in those countries, the extent to which challenges around propaganda and disinformation are simultaneously not new, but also developing at warp speed in terms of the ways the malicious actors are misusing these new technologies and platforms. I see lots of echoes of what is happening in these countries in other parts of the world that GNI works in and the US, where I am located. It really has confirmed something I suspected going in, which was that the challenges that these countries are dealing with in the information environment are lessons that have real global implications and consequences.

For more information about the High Level Expert Group’s work: IMS launches circle of experts to advise on digital legislation in Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine | IMS

The recommendations are expected in January 2025