On 17 September 2026, the European Commission proposed the EU KIDS Act, promising to make digital services safer for children through age restrictions, safer default settings and stronger obligations on platform design.[1] Its most visible measure would delay independent accounts on certain social-networking and video-sharing services until age 15. Yet the proposal is not simply an EU-wide social-media ban: the account restriction is linked to specified risk-generating functionalities, including contact with strangers, profiling-based recommendations and uninterrupted feeds.
The proposal, still subject to the ordinary legislative procedure, raises a more consequential question. If the Digital Services Act (DSA) already requires platforms to protect minors, whyvlegislate again? The answer may lie in a change of regulatory technique: from askingvplatforms to assess risks and select mitigations towards prescribing particular design choices.
Whether this improves protection without sacrificing children’s rights or entrenching established platforms deserves closer scrutiny.

Fundamental Rights, Not Protection Alone

Martin Husovec characterises the DSA as both a fairness regime and, for the largest services, a risk-management regime. His account highlights a central difficulty: when public authorities compel platforms to regulate online activity, decisions apparently taken by private intermediaries also engage constraints on public power.[2] For legally accessible content, he argues that risk-management powers cannot become an unrestricted licence for regulators to determine what speech is acceptable.
That insight matters for child protection. Article 24 of the EU Charter makes children’s best interests a primary consideration, but Articles 7, 8 and 11 also protect privacy, personal data and freedom of expression and information.[3] Minors are not merely recipients of safety measures; they exercise rights online. As the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child explains, regulation must take account of their evolving capacities and opportunities for participation.[4]

What the DSA Already Requires

Article 28(1) DSA obliges online platforms accessible to minors, subject to its statutory scope and exemptions, to take appropriate and proportionate measures ensuring a high level of privacy, safety and security. Article 28(2) separately prohibits profiling-based advertising where providers know with reasonable certainty that a recipient is a minor. For very large online platforms and search engines, Article 34 requires assessments of systemic risks—including effects on children’s rights—and Article 35 requires reasonable, proportionate and effective mitigation.[5]
This is already preventive regulation, not merely notice-and-takedown. Risk assessments must consider service design and algorithmic systems, and mitigation can include adaptations to interfaces and recommender systems. The Commission’s 2025 Article 28 Guidelines go further in recommending age assurance, privacy-preserving defaults and safeguards against manipulative design.[6] But guidance is not legislation: it sets an influential interpretative benchmark without converting every suggested measure into an individually binding rule.
The DSA’s advantage is adaptability. Its weakness is that broad standards leave providers considerable discretion over what counts as sufficient protection, while regulators and researchers often lack equivalent access to the evidence needed to challenge those choices.

What the Board’s 2026 Report Adds

The European Board for Digital Services’ July 2026 report supplies an unusually concrete picture of the risk landscape. Drawing on platform assessments and external submissions, it identifies risks from endless feeds, autoplay, engagement-optimised recommendations, unwanted contact, grooming and AI-enabled image manipulation. Crucially, several risks stem from how systems combine, rather than from any single illegal post.[7]
But the report does not establish that every cited feature causes harm or that reported mitigations work. It expressly distinguishes systemic risks from realised harms and declines to designate observed practices as proven best practices. The evidence supports closer scrutiny of engagement-driven design; it does not, by itself, settle the proportionality of a particular age limit. Research also suggests that associations between social-media use and well-being can vary with developmental stage, cautioning against treating all adolescents as a uniform group.[8]

Making Safety by Design a Legal Obligation

The proposed KIDS Act would make some regulatory expectations substantially more specific. Article 6 would restrict autonomous accounts for under-15s on social-networking and video-sharing services possessing listed risky features, with limited guardian-controlled access contemplated for younger teenagers. A separate Article 7 exception concerns qualifying child-oriented video-sharing services for under-13s. These distinctions matter: the proposal targets particular services and functionalities, rather than every online interaction by children.[1]
The design obligations are more revealing still. Article 9 would constrain features
encouraging compulsive use, including content consumption without effective stopping points. Article 10 would require recommender systems to give primary weight to expressly stated preferences and disable recommendations based on implicit engagement signals by default. Articles 11 and 12 address protective default settings and unsolicited contact. Article 14 would require AI companions and chatbots to avoid designs likely to create emotional dependency, alongside testing and other safeguards.[1]
Proposed Articles 27–29 set standards for privacy-preserving age assurance; Article 5 would require designated very large social-networking and video-sharing platforms to submit compliance plans for independent audit. The Commission presents this as shifting responsibility onto providers to demonstrate safety.[9] Legally, however, it is better understood as additional compliance and evidentiary duties, not a blanket reversal of every burden of proof in enforcement proceedings.
This is therefore an evolution, not a replacement, of the DSA. The proposal expressly
preserves existing DSA obligations while turning selected elements of earlier non-binding guidance into proposed hard law.

Fairness Has a Market Dimension

For digital markets, the underlying concern is an incentive mismatch. Personalisation and continuous engagement can generate commercial value even where their effects on vulnerable users are difficult to observe. Prescriptive safeguards could prevent platforms from treating those costs as external to product design. Yet uniform technical obligations are not costless: large incumbents may absorb verification, auditing and engineering expenses more easily than smaller rivals. The proposal’s absence of a general exemption for micro and small enterprises makes this especially relevant.[1]
Fundamental-rights safeguards are equally important. Age verification could minimise disclosure by proving only an age threshold, but ineffective implementation could produce surveillance, exclusion or mistaken denial of access. The European Data Protection Board accordingly stresses necessity, proportionality and data minimisation.[10] By analogy, the Court’s judgment in Poland v Parliament and Council demonstrates that EU-mandated technological restrictions require safeguards against disproportionate interference with lawful expression; it does not decide the legality of the KIDS Act.[11]

Conclusion

The KIDS Act’s most important innovation may not be its age threshold but its attempt to make platform architecture itself a direct object of legislation. Husovec’s rights-based theory explains why this demands restraint; the DSA supplies the existing duties; and the Board’s report shows why leaving design decisions largely to providers is contested.
More prescriptive rules may improve legal certainty and curb harmful incentives. They may also reduce flexibility, burden smaller providers and constrain legitimate participation unless supported by reliable evidence, privacy-preserving technology and effective appeals. The task for EU legislators is therefore not simply to demand safer platforms, but to determine which design rules are demonstrably necessary—and who bears the costs when those rules are mistaken.

References

[1] European Commission, Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council: EU KIDS ACT — EU Keeping Internet Digital Spaces Accountable and Trustworthy COM(2026) 681 final (17 September 2026), explanatory memorandum and arts 5–14, 27–29. EUR-Lex.
[2] Martin Husovec, Principles of the Digital Services Act (Oxford University Press 2024) 33–35, 333–335, 391–393. Oxford University Press.
[3] Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union [2012] OJ C326/391, arts 7, 8, 11, 24 and 52(1). EUR-Lex.
[4] UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, General Comment No 25 (2021) on Children’s Rights in Relation to the Digital Environment UN Doc CRC/C/GC/25 (2 March 2021), paras 16–21, 50–55 and 84–86. United Nations.
[5] Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 19 October 2022 on a Single Market for Digital Services (Digital Services Act) [2022] OJ L277/1, arts 28, 34 and 35. EUR-Lex.
[6] European Commission, Guidelines on Measures to Ensure a High Level of Privacy, Safety and Security for Minors Online, Pursuant to Article 28(4) of Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 C/2025/6826, [2025] OJ C/2025/5519, paras 12, 17 and sections 5–8. EUR-Lex.
[7] European Board for Digital Services and European Commission, Second Report on the Most Prominent and Recurrent Systemic Risks as well as Mitigation Measures (1 July 2026) 5–7, 43–46, 51–52. European Commission publication, 2 July 2026.
[8] Amy Orben, Andrew K Przybylski, Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and Rogier A Kievit,
‘Windows of Developmental Sensitivity to Social Media’ (2022) 13 Nature Communications 1649. DOI.
[9] European Commission, ‘EU KIDS Act to Restrict Social Media Platforms’ Access to Children in the EU’ (Press release, 17 September 2026). European Commission.

[10] European Data Protection Board, Statement 1/2025 on Age Assurance (adopted 11 February 2025). EDPB.
[11] Case C-401/19 Republic of Poland v European Parliament and Council of the European Union EU:C:2022:297, paras 83–86. EUR-Lex.

Researchers, practitioners and policymakers working on digital sovereignty have one week left to submit to the 3rd International Conference on Digital Sovereignty (ICDS 2026). The conference takes place from 25 to 27 November 2026 at Forskningsparken (Oslo Science Park) in Oslo, Norway.

About ICDS 2026

ICDS was founded by the Institute for Energy Technology (IFE) and has quickly become a leading international forum for examining how digital sovereignty is changing. Nations and organisations face growing challenges around digital infrastructure, strategic autonomy and data governance, which makes resilient and ethical frameworks more urgent than ever.

This third edition builds on the success of ICDS 2024 and ICDS 2025. It introduces a dedicated Industry Day that will bring together senior leaders from across sectors with researchers and policymakers from around the world.

Publication Opportunities

Springer Proceedings in Complexity: All accepted papers will be published in Springer Proceedings in Complexity. The series is indexed in Scopus, DBLP and Web of Science, and is ranked Level 1 in the Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals.

Emerald journal special invitation: Authors of all accepted papers will be invited to submit extended versions to the Emerald International Journal of Digital Sovereignty and Global Data Governance, which was established by the IFE Digital Sovereignty team. Learn more about the journal’s partnership with ICDS.

International Journal of Information Security (Springer): Selected papers will also be invited to the International Journal of Information Security (IJIS). The journal has an impact factor of 5.0 and is ranked Level 2.

Conference Tracks

ICDS 2026 has five tracks:

1. Human-Centric Digital Sovereignty
2. Industry and Innovation Impact
3. Digital Ecosystems and Governance
4. National Digital Sovereignty and Societal Impact
5. Geopolitics and Trust

Full track descriptions are available on the official ICDS 2026 page.

Topics of Interest

The organisers welcome papers on any area related to digital sovereignty. Relevant keywords include Artificial Intelligence, Computational Intelligence, Cybersecurity, Digital Trust, Trustworthiness, Human-Centric AI, Human-AI Teams, Sovereignty, Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence of Things, Sustainable Development Goals, Sustainability, Big Data, Data Analytics, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Intelligent Systems, Cloud Computing, Edge Computing, Blockchain, Digital Autonomy, Federated Systems and Resilience.

Submission Guidelines

Authors should submit an original full paper of 6 to 10 pages in English, formatted according to the Springer Computer Science Proceedings guidelines. Templates are also available on the ICDS 2026 web page.

Submissions must be original. They must not have been published or accepted for publication elsewhere, and they must not be under review at any other conference before or during the ICDS 2026 review process.

Submit your paper here: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=icds20260

Important Dates

The first day, 25 November, is given to keynotes and industry presentations. On 26 and 27 November there will be keynotes and scientific presentations, plus networking during an Oslo tour.

Previous Editions

ICDS 2024 papers were published in Elsevier Procedia Computer Science. ICDS 2025 papers appeared in Springer Proceedings in Complexity, which is also the publication venue for ICDS 2026.

Contact

For questions, contact the General Chairs:

• Sanjay Misra, Senior Scientist, Institute for Energy Technology (IFE), Halden, Norway: sanjay.misra@ife.no
• Petter Kvalvik, Institute for Energy Technology (IFE): petter.kvalvik@ife.no

Don’t miss this chance to contribute to the international conversation on digital sovereignty. Submit by 30 September 2026, and we hope to see you in Oslo this November.

A new one-day conference in Malmö asks researchers to rethink what “resistance” means in the age of artificial intelligence. It takes place on 5 November 2026 at Media Evolution in Malmö, Sweden. Attendance is free, and the organisers are now accepting abstracts.

About the Conference

Polls and commentators often report that people distrust AI. Yet governments keep backing AI firms, and the market value of the chipmakers behind AI keeps climbing. Many of the CEOs leading these firms present themselves as fighting “the elite,” even though they have held economic power and political influence at the centre of that elite for more than a decade.

The conference looks at three seemingly contradictory faces of techno-resistance in the age of AI.

Resistance against AI

In an otherwise polarised time, “Anti-AI” or “Alter-AI,” in its many forms, has become a rallying point that crosses the political spectrum. It also stands in for wider movements against centralisation. As AI moves into the physical world, some people have attacked robots and posted videos urging others to do the same. Environmental activists are finding new allies in campaigns against new datacentre projects. Resistance against AI can also give feedback that improves how AI is used in practice. It also shows up in pushback against how AI is represented, in negotiations over AI regulation, and in debates about its public use.

Resistance with AI

At the same time, people use AI as a tool to resist other targets. Cash-strapped NGOs use it to make up for lost funding. Individuals use it to present themselves better when they deal with companies, politicians or their local doctor. Some see AI-powered “civic tech” as a route to more democratic decision-making and stronger communities. Others warn that the political economy behind AI, including who owns the algorithms and the data, makes it a fool’s paradise to expect these platforms to reinvigorate the public sphere.

Resistance for AI

A strong current of thought in Silicon Valley and its satellites holds that AI is being built as an alternative to the way society is currently organised. The demand for AI appears in projects ranging from private bitcoin-based settlements to AI-focused religions. It often serves as a banner for very wealthy individuals who want to resist conventional politics built on democracy and public authority.

Themes

The organisers welcome abstracts on one or more of the following themes:

• Resisting mainstream visualisation of AI
• Resistance as a source of innovation for better AI
• Underground extremist movements against AI
• “Anti-AI” as the umbrella of a wider social movement
• Tech bro self-narratives as “revolutionaries”
• Civic tech and civil society: the good and the bad
• Conceptualising resistance strategies in AI
• Contesting AI regulation
• Resistance across the design, development and deployment of AI
• Resistance by civil servants
• Resistance by everyday actors
• Professional resistance: how workers seek to modify, subvert and/or avoid AI

How to Submit

Send an abstract of no more than 250 words by email to the conference’s main organiser, Michael Strange, at Michael.Strange@mau.se.

• Subject line: RESISTANCE-AI
• Deadline: 1 October 2026

Important Dates

Attendance

This is a full-day, in-person event. Attendance is free and includes a coffee break and lunch. Space is limited. Depending on numbers, the organisers may also welcome participants who are not presenting.

Venue

Media Evolution
Stora Varvsgatan 6A, 211 19 Malmö, Sweden
www.mediaevolution.se

Organisers

The conference is hosted by the Future Society & Democracy in Europe research group. It is funded by the Centre for Modern European Studies (CEMES), a joint initiative of the University of Copenhagen, Malmö University and Lund University. It is organised in collaboration with the AI Politics Hub at Malmö University.

Contact

For questions about the conference, contact Michael Strange at michael.strange@mau.se.

Whether your work looks at resistance against AI, with AI or for AI, this is a chance to add to a timely, interdisciplinary conversation. Submit your abstract by 1 October 2026, and join the discussion in Malmö this November.

Exploring the New Frontiers of EU Law is the latest publication of the Commission’s Legal Service. Its subject matter reflects the period: the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the digital and green transitions, and the more recent emphasis on economic security.

The book is not neutral in the conventional academic sense. The contributors are largely describing legal developments in which the Commission itself has played a central role. The book is consequently most useful when read both as a substantive account of recent developments and as an example of how the EU’s legal establishment justifies those developments.

The Expansion of EU Legal Competence

The first part examines developments within the internal market, including the use
of Article 114 TFEU in areas of industrial policy, the Digital Services Act, cybersecurity and crypto-asset regulation, alongside the changing organisation of the EU administration itself. The second part turns towards issues with a stronger external and security dimension, including foreign direct investment screening, sanctions, the European defence industry, drones, EU criminal law and the rule-of- law mechanism. The range of subjects illustrates how far EU law now extends beyond the traditional concerns of economic integration.
Articles 114 and 122 TFEU are particularly important examples. Vaccine procurement, the Digital COVID Certificate and other emergency measures required legal bases and institutional arrangements that were not straightforwardly provided for in the Treaties. NextGenerationEU went further, involving common EU borrowing on a scale that represented a significant development in the Union’s economic governance.
Treaty flexibility allows the Union to respond to circumstances that could not reasonably have been foreseen when the Treaties were agreed. At the same time, the more existing provisions are used to support new areas of Union action, the more difficult it becomes to distinguish interpretation from an effective expansion of competence. The practical difficulty of treaty reform makes the Commission’s approach understandable, but it does not remove the constitutional question. The book is strongest in demonstrating how this process has occurred; it is less convincing as a critical examination of its limits.

Competition Law and Its New Frontiers

Its central argument is that the increasing consideration of objectives such as sustainability, industrial policy and labour protection does not mean that EU competition law has abandoned its traditional foundations. Articles 101 and 102 TFEU remain the starting point, and the chapter places recent developments within the longer constitutional history of EU competition law rather than presenting them as a complete departure from established doctrine.

Three areas are especially significant. The first is labour markets. Competition law has traditionally been associated with product and service markets, but the treatment of collective bargaining and the position of self-employed and platform workers has increasingly brought labour markets within the field of competition policy. The development of the case law following Albany and Kunsten, together with the Commission’s 2022 guidelines on collective bargaining by solo self- employed and gig workers, reflects an attempt to distinguish legitimate collective bargaining from anticompetitive coordination. More recent enforcement against labour-market restrictions, including no-poach arrangements, suggests that this is becoming a genuine area of competition enforcement rather than a peripheral issue.
The second is sustainability. Environmental considerations can now form part of competition-law analysis, particularly in the context of the European Green Deal. The important point, however, is that sustainability does not necessarily require competition law to abandon its existing framework.
The third concerns privacy and data. In digital markets, personal data can be an important source of competitive advantage, meaning that data protection considerations increasingly intersect with questions of dominance and merger control.

Continuity Rather Than Revolution

None of these developments amounts to a complete reconstruction of EU competition law. The contribution instead demonstrates how established Treaty principles can be applied to economic relationships that were largely absent from the traditional conception of competition policy. The significance lies in the accumulation of these developments: labour markets, sustainability and data protection each bring competition law into closer contact with other areas of EU regulation and policy.
This is also where the chapter’s emphasis on continuity is important. The recent expansion of competition law into new areas does not necessarily undermine its constitutional foundations. The principles of Articles 101 and 102 TFEU remain intact, alongside the foundational case law of the Court of Justice.

Conclusion

The book is therefore a valuable reference point. Its principal value is not that it provides the final word on these developments, but that it records, unusually clearly, how the institution itself understands the legal changes it has helped to create.
That limitation does not make the book unimportant. On the contrary, its institutional perspective is one of its most useful features. It provides a detailed account of how the Commission understands the development of EU law during a period in which the Union has assumed responsibilities extending well beyond its traditional internal-market role. The competition law discussion is particularly effective in showing how a mature area of EU law is adapting to labour markets, sustainability and digitalisation without abandoning its Treaty foundations.

A One-Day CEMES-FIDMA Research Network Workshop on the Legal, Political and Intellectual Transformations of Market

Brief overview:

• Activity: Half-day interdisciplinary European research network workshop with researchers from Malmö University, Copenhagen University and FIDMA Network.
• Date: 4th December 2026, 9.00-15.00
• Venue: Malmö University, Faculty of Culture and Society
• To be a part of this exciting event please send an abstract to behrang.kianzad@mau.se no later than 30th September.

Summary

What does it mean to make digital fairness European? This halfday FIDMA-CEMES research workshop investigates how ideas of digital sovereignty, digital fairness, market order, consumer autonomy and democratic legitimacy have travelled through modern European political, legal and intellectual history and reappear today in EU digital regulation, AI governance and platform markets.
By bringing together researchers from law, history, political economy, philosophy, media studies and European studies, we hope this workshop will reposition digital sovereignty as a problem of modern European transformation rather than as a narrow technology-law issue.
This event is planned as a concentrated half-day research workshop hosted at Malmö University divided on a morning and an afternoon session with lunch break. Cost of travel and lodging will be provided for invited researchers.

Background

Fairness has returned to the centre of European public life. The Digital Markets Act, the Digital Services Act, the Data Act, the AI Act, GDPR and the renewed interest in Article 102 TFEU all mobilise vocabularies of fairness, contestability, transparency, autonomy, dependency and institutional accountability. Yet the meaning of fairness in Europe remains historically layered and politically contested. It cannot be understood only as a compliance term in current digital regulation. It belongs to a longer European story about just price, market order, social conflict, democratic legitimacy, ordoliberalism, consumer citizenship, welfare institutions and the changing relationship between public authority and private power.
This workshop therefore reframes digital fairness as a problem in modern European
studies. It asks how Europe’s intellectual, legal and political traditions have shaped the concept of fair market order, and how these traditions are now being reworked under conditions of platformisation, data extraction and AI-mediated decision-making. The central hypothesis is that contemporary EU digital regulation should be read not only as technical economic regulation, but as a new phase in Europe’s attempt to govern concentrated
private power through public norms of legitimacy.
This approach creates a stronger bridge between European studies and current digital market research. It links the history of European political economy, legal philosophy and market regulation to urgent contemporary questions: Who defines fairness in digital markets? How do European institutions transform moral and political
ideals into administrative rules? How do ideas of autonomy and citizenship survive when markets are organised through data, platform dependency and algorithmic infrastructures? And how does Europe’s regulatory self-understanding travel globally – through imitation, resistance, trade, standard-setting and geopolitical contestation?

Research questions

This workshop will connect scholars working on European legal history, competition and market regulation, political theory, philosophy, digital media, AI governance and global Europe.

1. How do EU digital market and AI laws reshape European ideas of sovereignty, autonomy, democracy, consumer citizenship and institutional legitimacy?
2. How do European fairness norms travel globally through regulation, standard-setting, corporate compliance and contestation by other regions?
3. Which interdisciplinary methods can make the study of digital fairness legible across history, law, politics, philosophy and media studies?
4. What is the interaction between digital sovereignty and digital fairness?

Programme

• Welcome address by CEMES & FIDMA
• Morning Panel: Digital fairness, digital sovereignty and the European regulatory state – DMA, DSA, AI Act, Data Act and GDPR as contemporary market-ordering projects and their interaction with consumer protection and consumer sovereignty
• Afternoon Panel: How to study digital sovereignty and digital fairness across law, history, philosophy, politics and media studies in the interface of law and policy
• Closing Roundtable

To be a part of this exciting event please send an abstract to behrang.kianzad@mau.se no later than 15th September.

Presented by Prof. Jörgen Hettne at the Second Annual Conference on Fairness in Digital Markets and Artificial Intelligence – Synthetic Imaginaries of Digital Fairness

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Presented by Prof. Dr. Mateja Đurović at the Second Annual Conference on Fairness in Digital Markets and Artificial Intelligence – Synthetic Imaginaries of Digital Fairness

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Presented by Teresa Rodríguez de las Heras Ballell at the Second Annual Conference on Fairness in Digital Markets and Artificial Intelligence – Synthetic Imaginaries of Digital Fairness

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Presented by Krzysztof Koźmiński and Jan Rudnicki at the FIDMA Second Annual Conference