Lazar Radic on the Brussels Effect

ICLE Senior Scholar Lazar Radic was quoted by ExchangeWire in a story about how other jurisdictions are looking to copy the EU’s Digital Markets Act. You can read the full piece here.

ICLE’s Lazar Radic calls what the DMA is trying to achieve ‘the Brussels effect’ – “a regulatory contagion from the EU to other places. This would turn it into something like what you have called “the world’s digital police,” at least within the boundaries of the conduct covered by the DMA,” he explains.

…For advertisers, adapting to managing additional silos can further complicate an already tricky task. With the fragmentation of tracking and profiling individuals at scale without relying on third-party data, which is frequently stored in third-party cookies, many marketers are already grappling with this challenge. Radic describes this as “…clearly designed to drive a wedge in gatekeepers’ ad tech model, preventing them from cross-using data between a core platform services and any other service provided by the gatekeeper – for example, between an online search engine, a messaging app, and a social networking app.”

…“Gatekeeper’s ad tech might become less effective, and their ads less relevant. This hurts gatekeepers. In turn, given gatekeepers’ loss of control of advertising on their own platforms, end-users might be exposed to more irrelevant, random advertising noise from third-parties,” explains Radic. “This hurts consumers. The DMA could also impact gatekeepers’ incentives to invest in their platform, seeing as how the regulation purposefully facilitates third parties from free-riding on those investments. This, in the end, hurts everyone.”