Definitions in EU Digital Law, 2000-2025
Every field has its stock complaint, the one you can serve at any conference without fear of contradiction. In EU digital law it is this. The rulebook lacks a coherent conceptual vocabulary. The same person is a data subject in one instrument and an end user in the next, the same platform changes costume from article to article.
This summer I decided to check it, and to open the series with the result, because definitions are position zero for what this newsletter studies. Everything a regulation requires runs through its defined terms, so a gap or an incompatibility in the vocabulary reappears in every provision built on the affected terms, and nothing downstream repairs it. Firms inherit the residue as legal uncertainty. They spend on advice rather than on products, and where the words are widest they over-comply. The burden of establishing what the law asks shifts, in practice, onto the regulated, and a market that works this way taxes its own competitiveness.