EU should centralise regulatory enforcement of digital rules

The EU should create a dedicated European digital agency to resolve widespread enforcement fragmentation and bridge a growing regulatory deficit, according to a newly published strategy paper co-authored by Kai Zenner and Maria Koomen.

Europe’s digital framework comprises 171 digital laws and provides 315 EU-level bodies with 597 overlapping and potentially conflicting mandates. According to the paper, such structural division fuels legal uncertainty, drives up compliance costs, and allows dominant technology companies to treat regulatory compliance as negotiable. As the EU begins enforcing the Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) and ramps up enforcement of the Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act (DMA), the authors warn that oversight remains under-resourced, delayed, and susceptible to political interference.

To streamline governance, the paper outlines a three-step phased reform. In the short term by 2027, it recommends creating an EU Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum modelled on the UK Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum (DRCF) and supported by existing European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) infrastructure. 

In the medium term, across 2028 and 2029, the European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HaDEA) should be transformed into an independent Digital Enforcement Agency under the 2028–2034 Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) to supervise major platforms and general-purpose artificial intelligence (GPAI) providers. 

The long-term plan envisions treaty-level reform post-2030 to establish unified enforcement across the Digital Single Market.

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