Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast The Tech Brief

The European Commission is currently engaged in "direct" and "intensive" collaboration with California legislators, who have just approved a new AI bill that could "strengthen" and "complement" the EU’s AI regulation.

In today's episode, we learn how the Commission works in California and explore whether the US state could prove an important ally in the EU’s efforts to enforce its new digital rulebook.

Join Tech Reporter Jacob Wulff Wold as he sits down with Gerard de Graaf, senior EU envoy to the US for digital and tech and head of the EU office in San Francisco, and Pierre Larouche, professor in law and innovation at the University of Montreal and research fellow at the Centre on Regulation in Europe.

English singer Charli XCX’s new album, "Brat," is making waves, and Elon Musk, with his legal battles, clashes with the EU, and endorsement of Donald Trump, seems to embody the “brat” vibe. Did you miss the summer drama? Euractiv’s tech team has you covered.

A group of digital rights organisation said that Apple’s plans to comply with the Digital Markets Act (DMA) are ineffective in a submission to the European Commission. The EU executive has opened three non-compliance investigations into Apple’s plans to conform to the DMA, the bloc’s landmark digital competition law. In one of these investigations, the Commission said in preliminary findings that the company is in breach of the DMA with its App Store policies.
We are joined by Simonetta Vezzoso, who is an academic from Trento university. She is also a lawyer and economist who a consults Article 19, one of the organisations that filed the submission.

The EU has set ambitious goals for securing its supply of critical raw materials, which are key to the digital and green transitions. Today we talk to Chad Blewitt, managing director of the Jadar Project, a highly-anticipated and highly-delayed lithium mining site in Serbia. Jadar is operated by Rio Tinto, the world’s second largest mining company. Can the goals set by the Critical Raw Materials Act be achieved by 2030, and, crucially, how important is cutting red tape to achieving these goals?

On Friday afternoon, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, announced it is pausing plans to roll out artificial intelligence (AI) features that would use users’ public posts to train its AI models. The company cited a request from the Irish Data Protection Commission.

Digital rights NGO Noyb filed 11 complaints against Meta’s AI plans in Europe earlier that week, asking for an urgency procedure.This week, we speak to Noyb founder and lawyer Max Schrems about why they filed  the complaints and what to expect.

This week, together with Marco Scialdone, a lawyer and adjunct professor of law and management of digital content and services at the European University of Rome, we delve into the impact of the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) on consumer protection in e-commerce, focusing on the responsibilities of online marketplaces and the role of consumer organisations like Euroconsumers in ensuring product safety.

The European Commission kicked off plans to boost investments in its AI sector back in 2018. But they were neither clearly defined, nor well coordinated, argued the European Court of Auditors (ECA) in a report released this week. The gap of investments and innovation has only grown with the US since these plans were put in motion, research has found.

This week we talk to Mihails Kozlovs, a member of the ECA who led the report, about what it means for the future.

The Council of Europe, the bloc's human rights body, adopted its first framework convention on artificial intelligence (AI_, democracy and the rule of law on 17 May. It's heralded as the world's first binding international treaty to ensure the technology doesn't interfere with human rights. But the negotiations were riddled with criticism, particularly around the treatment of the private sector.

We are joined by Hanne Juncher, Director of Security, Integrity and Rule of Law of the Council of Europe, who deals with AI and negotiated the Convention to discuss if it is worth the hype after all.

Tornado Cash co-founder Alexey Pertsev was sentenced to a little over five months in jail this week by a Dutch court, for helping to create a tool that obfuscates the trail of cryptocurrencies. The tool, built and run on Ethereum blockchain, was used by hackers to launder their illicitly obtained funds.

The defense argued that this was a decentralized, open-source tool, and that they had little control over its use to launder millions, possibly billions of funds by criminals.

We are joined by David Carlisle, Vice President of Regulatory Affairs at blockchain analytics firm Elliptic and author of “The Crypto Launderers: Crime and Cryptocurrencies from the Dark Web to DeFi and Beyond,” to discuss what this case means for developers and the crypto ecosystem overall.

Following the EU and NATO  condemning Russian cyber espionage group APT28 last week, we talked to independent cyber policy expert Pavlina Pavlova about APT28’s methods, the EU’s response, and what the possible next steps are.

This week, we are discussing the artificial intelligence liability directive (AILD), a key part of the EU's continuously evolving digital rulebook. The AILD is expected to fill an important legislative gap that will allow consumers to seek compensation for damages caused by AI products.

We are joined by Beatrice Schütte, postdoc researcher at the University of Helsinki and the University of Lapland, and Shu Li, Assistant Professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam.

This week, together with Andrea Renda, Senior Research Fellow and Head of the CEPS Unit on Global Governance, Regulation, Innovation and the Digital Economy, we break down the Letta report's key technological insights, what is missing from the document, and what to anticipate from the report by Mario Draghi.

Enrico Letta, a former Italian Prime Minister, whom European leaders asked to write a report on the state of the EU’s single market, published his findings last week, while former president of the European Investment Bank Mario Draghi's report is expected to be published at the end of June.

Last week, the EU Parliament voted to pass amendments to Eurodac, previously a fingerprints database, along with a new Migration Pact to boost border security.

The expansion of Eurodac will see migrants’ biometric data, including facial images, collected and stored for 10 years and exchanged between police and border authorities.

This includes children as young as six years old.On today’s podcast, rapporteur for the file, MEP Jorge Buxade Villalba said why he thinks regulation is necessary — and why he thinks it has been vilified be NGOs. In a separate interview, AccesNow’s Caterina Rodelli, said on why she thinks the Eurodac entails mass surveillance for migrants and asylum seekers — and why she that’s a bad thing.

This week we talk to Max von Thun, Europe Director at the Open Markets Institute about competition policy.Amid a barrage of measures and investigations on digital competition in recent weeks, the think tank co-authored a manifesto calling for a revamp of competition policy, including structural changes within the Commission.

Crucial to those is a change in culture within the executive, but is it tenable?

This week, we talk to the European Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly, about the European Commission’s delays in responding to Access to Documents requests, their impact on EU citizens, artificial intelligence, and more.

This week, together with Pavlina Pavlova, Public Policy Advisor at the CyberPeace Institute, we look at cybersecurity issues, such as the 2024 Munich Security Report's revelation of heightened cyber-attack risks, the phone hacking of the European Parliament's defence committee, predictions for the upcoming European Parliament elections, and the United Nations Cybercrime Convention.

This week's episode was recorded at the Fundamental Rights Forum, which took place in Vienna on the 11th and 12th of March, organised by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights.

This week, together with the European Data Protection Supervisor Wojciech Wiewiórowski, we look at data protection issues, including the regulation concerning the detection and removal of online child sexual abuse material, as well as Frontex’s handling of migrants’ data, and the recent news regarding the European Commission's violation of data protection rules in its use of Microsoft.

This week's episode was recorded at the Fundamental Rights Forum, which took place in Vienna on the 11th and 12th of March, organised by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights.

Together with Katja Muñoz, research fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations’ Center for Geopolitics, Geoeconomics, and Technology, we talk about the impact of social media and technology on the 2024 European Parliament elections, TikTok and Meta’s election preparations, the lack of access for data for researchers, and even Taylor Swift.

As the security and resilience of submarine cables became a priority for Europe after the sabotage of a cable between Finland and Estonia in October 2023, EU countries requested the Commission to take action. The EU executive published a recommendation on 21 February, that we are analysing with to our invitee of the week, Louis Obry, public affairs officer at Europacable, the industry association of Europe’s wire and cable producers.

With Nick Ashton-Hart, Senior Director at APCO Worldwide and Head of Delegation for the Cybersecurity Tech Accord, we take a look at the progress of the negotiations on the UN Convention on Cybercrime and the concluding session, which ended with a suspension on Friday (9 February).

With Klaus Landefeld, Vice Chairman of the Management Board at the Association of the Internet Industry (eco), we discuss the outcome of the AI Act and its implications for Germany. One point of discussion is real-time biometric surveillance, which was previously excluded by the federal government in its coalition agreement.

As the United Nations are preparing to adopt the Global Digital Compact later this year, we discussed this initiative with Tech Envoy Amandeep Singh Gill and what it means for internet governance, Artificial Intelligence and the EU’s international projection on digital policy.

As the AI Act’s text is finally consolidate, we tried to put the landmark law in a broader perspective with Luciano Floridi, leading expert in AI ethics and Founding Director of Yale’s Digital Ethics Center.

Joined by Gustav Kalbe previous head of unit for Quantum and now acting director for this research field, we talk about the EU’s plans to build a future ecosystem of super- and quantum computers. This podcast episode also dives into the role of the European sovereignty and standards-setting for post-quantum cryptography.

Since Brexit, the UK Competition and Markets Authority has regained its status as a prominent competition enforcer. As the British Parliament is set to adopt a bill that will increase the CMA’s powers and introduce new obligations on tech companies, we discussed with Verity Egerton Doyle and William Leslie, partners in Linklaters' Antitrust & Foreign Investment practice, the prospects of competition policy on the other side of the Channel, as well as potential tensions and similarities with the EU, starting with the Digital Markets Act.

With Aline Blankertz, Policy and Public Sector Officer at Wikimedia, we have a look at the big events that happened in the areas of data policy and competition in 2023 and discuss the EU's future and biggest challenges for 2024. We also dive into the developments of the Data Act and the Digital Markets Act as well as the EU’s approach to personal health data and data on businesses trade secrets.

Following the political agreement on the AI Act last week, we caught up with Kris Shrishak, a Enforce Senior Fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, and Philipp Hacker, Chair for Law and Ethics of the Digital Society at the European New School of Digital, Studies to discuss the deal in detail.

This week, we talked to MEP Sophie in ‘t Veld who has been spearheading the work of the Pegasus investigation in the European Parliament’s already disbanded Committee of Inquiry to investigate the use of Pegasus and equivalent surveillance spyware.

In ‘t Veld told Euractiv that no new Committee will be set up. However, the Dutch MEP is running for another term in the European Parliament and said she will keep pursuing the topic if gets elected again, but hopes that someone will do so in case she will not be elected, too.

The European Commission adopted the delegated act regulating the auditing of algorithms under the DSA last month. We discussed the challenges in this field and possible implications in terms of technical standards and interlinks with the AI Act with Catalina Goanta, an associate professor at Utrecht University, and Jurriaan Parie, director at Algorithm Audit.

The re-explosion of the Middle East's conflict has brought a flood of illegal and harmful content across the web. We discussed how this crisis is, for the first time, testing the Digital Services Act, the EU's content moderation rulebook, with Rose Jackson, Director of the Democracy and Tech Initiative of the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab.

After several months of controversial delays, Luca Tagliaretti was recently appointed the new Executive Director at EU Cybersecurity Competence Centre (ECCC). We discuss with him the prospect of this EU body, its role in Europe’s security posture and the overall state of cybersecurity in the Union.

The negotiations on the AI Act are at a critical stage, with important chapters such as foundation models, governance, and law enforcement still on the table. We caught up with Brando Benifei, one of the lawmakers spearheading the file, to discuss the current state of the negotiations and possible landing zones. 

EU policymakers are hashing out their approach to open source software in the Cyber Resilience Act. We discussed how this regulation would affect the open source software community with Bert Hubert, an IT developer and tech entrepreneur.

EU policymakers' understanding of this area's metaverse and regulatory needs has been developing in several initiatives. We took stock of the EU institutions' thinking and current market trends with Anselm Kuesters, head of division at the Centre for European Policy, and Patrick Grady, tech lead at Fourtold.

This week, Max Schrems, an Austrian lawyer and activist who launched the not-for-profit organisation NYOB, standing for None-of-Your-Business, joins Euractiv Tech brief podcast to talk about the European Union - United States Data Privacy Framework, the new transatlantic agreement allowing EU data to be transferred to the US.

Schrems has been known for filing multiple lawsuits which bear his name. The cases Schrems I and Schrems II are well known for anyone working in the sphere of data privacy or in the implementation of the EU General Protection of Data Regulation (GDPR) because they put an end to previous transatlantic data deals: the Safe Harbord in 2015 and the Privacy Schield in 2020.

This week, Schrems talks with us about the new complaint the activist decided to file in front of the Court of Justice of the EU regarding the Data Privacy Framework: from his motivations that led to the initiative, to his views on the Commission and his point of view regarding the need to "internationalise data protection".

The second episode of the two-part podcast series aims to shed light on the dynamics between the European and the American approach. In a discussion with Heike Hagemeier, an expert at the German Federal Office for Information Security, BSI, and Andrea Garcia Rodriguez, Lead Digital Policy Analyst for the EU Digital Agenda at the European Policy Centre (EPC), we talk about policy recommendations and the possibility of sandboxes.

Slovaks voted last Saturday on 30 September, but criticism abounded over the extensive abuse of political disinformation across online platforms – just as the Digital Services Act (DSA), the legislation tackling illegal content online, entered into force across the EU bloc.

With this in mind, David Wheeldon, Head of Public Policy in Europe for YouTube and Katarína Klingová, Senior Research Fellow of the Centre for Democracy & Resilience at the GLOBSEC Policy Institute are joining us to discuss their take on political disinformation in the Slovakian context and whether this is something we should fear at a broader EU level during next domestic and EU elections.

At the end of September, a report from the TrustLab, the organisation spearheading work with the European Commission on the topic of disinformation, stated that "Slovakia appeared to be more vulnerable to large-scale disinformation campaigns compared to other nations in Central Europe" and that "Facebook and YouTube were top platforms for messaging and social media in Slovakia.

The first episode of the two-part podcast series focusses on the EU’s preparedness for post-quantum encryption. With Heike Hagemeier, an expert at the German Federal Office for Information Security, BSI, and Andrea Garcia Rodriguez, Lead Digital Policy Analyst for the EU Digital Agenda at the European Policy Centre (EPC), we look at the state of affairs at EU and German level.

This week, the EuractivTech Brief podcast looks at the EU law on telecom infrastructures: the Gigabit Infrastructure Act.

To find out how the legislation went from an European Commission proposal, amending the 2014 Broadband Cost Reduction Directive, to a Parliament's position on 19 September, and take a look at the upcoming interinstitutional negotiations with the Council of the EU, we spoke with Mr Alin Mituța, Member of the European Parliament and rapporteur of the text.

With Raffaele Zallone, expert on data privacy law, IT contracts, ecommerce, and Internet law and regulation and Thomas Duhr, vice-president of the German Digital Economy Association (BVDW), we discussed the effectiveness of the  GDPR enforcement on national level and how the newly adopted German National Data Strategy plays into that. By having a closer look at the automotive industry, we discuss digital uncertainties that are not covered by the EU's data protection regime.

This week's Euractiv’s Tech Brief Podcast looks at the specific business model of tower companies and their potential regulation under a new EU legislation: the Gigabit Infrastructure Act.

Germany's implementation of the EU's flagship cybersecurity legislation, NIS-2 will be fully integrated into national law by 17 October 2024. We caught up with Steven Heckler, Deputy Head of Department for Digitalisation and Innovation at BDI (Federal Association of German Industry) to talk about the positive and negative effects of the NIS-2 directive on Germany and about recommendations to ensure the necessary level of cybersecurity.

The proposed regulation aiming to prevent and combat online child sexual abuse material (CSAM) would make it a requirement for digital platforms in the EU to detect and report such material. 
The draft law is dividing people into either thinking it is about child protection or a violation of users’ privacy. We discuss the topic with MEP Paul Tang, who is one of the shadow rapporteurs for the file, and Emily Slifer, Director of Policy at Thorn, an NGO which was co-founded by actor Ashton Kutcher and is focused on detecting CSAM online.

The rise of generative AI models like ChatGPT and Midjourney AI, able to produce incredibly realistic content, poses an unprecedented challenge to the creative sector. We discuss what this new generation of Artificial Intelligence means for this sector and human creativity more generally with Tom Chatfield, tech philosopher and author.

The European Court of Justice recently ruled on a high-profile case with far-reaching consequences for enforcement in the fields of competition and data protection. We have discussed the verdict’s implications with Cristina Caffarra, renowned competition expert, and Johnny Ryan, senior fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties.

The EU has been working on reporting obligations for private actors on actively exploited vulnerabilities and cybersecurity incidents in several legislative files while trying to establish mechanisms for sharing cyber threat intelligence, extremely sensitive information. We took stock of the different initiatives in this delicate area with Jo De Muynck, Head of Unit for Operational Cooperation at ENISA, and Cecilia Bonefeld-Dahl, Director-General of DIGITALEUROPE.

Andrea Renda, a senior research fellow at the think tank CEPS, has worked on the EU’s AI Act since its conception, advised EU policymakers during the negotiations and is currently part of the discussions on the AI Code of Conduct in the context of the EU-US Trade and Technology Council. He provides an insider view on the main challenge this landmark legislation faces, points for improvement during the trilogues and technological trends policymakers should keep in mind.

The European Parliament’s recently adopted position on the AI Act includes requirements for foundation models. Kevin Klyman and Rishi Bommasani from the Stanford Center for Research on Foundation Models & Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence have published a preliminary assessment of to what extent the main foundation models comply with the AI rules. We discuss with them the main findings of their research, what provisions would be most challenging for AI developers to comply with and further improvements that could be made to the EU’s AI law.