Original title: Mapping Europe’s Digital Acquis. A Granular History of EU Digital Policymaking
Timo Seidl, Dr. Nir Kosti · September 2026
The European Union creates many digital rules, but no one systematically tracked how many exist, where they appear, or what they actually do. To solve this, researchers broke down every EU regulation, directive, and decision from 1979 to today into nearly two million individual pieces. They then used artificial intelligence to read and sort each part. They found that digital rules grew from under one percent of newly passed EU legislation in the 1980s to roughly one in ten today. Most of these rules hide outside famous tech laws. Over time, digital policy grew much more assertive, aiming its duties and bans directly at private companies. While it mentions rights more often than other EU laws, it still focuses on markets, and the rights it includes are mostly civil.
Imagine you are cleaning out a huge attic that has been accumulating for decades. You know there are some famous antique pieces, but you have no idea how many other items are there or what they are. You decide to catalog everything, and you find that the famous pieces are only a small fraction, and most of the stuff is scattered in boxes. In this paper, the researchers cataloged decades of EU laws, finding that the well-known digital acts are just the tip of the iceberg, and most digital rules are hidden in other legislation.
For anyone affected by EU digital rules—companies, citizens, regulators—this is the first systematic map of what exists. It shows that most digital provisions are scattered outside the famous acts like the GDPR, and that the law increasingly targets private actors. This changes how we understand the balance of power and rights in the digital economy.
The abstract doesn't say, but the work is based on automated classification of legal texts, which may have errors despite human validation. It maps only EU-level legislation, not national implementations, and does not assess enforcement or real-world impact. The analysis focuses on two specific claims about assertiveness and rights orientation, leaving other dimensions unexplored.
Ask anything about this paper. Answers come from its abstract, and say so when the abstract doesn't cover your question.
Mapping Europe’s Digital Acquis. A Granular History of EU Digital Policymaking — Timo Seidl, Dr. Nir Kosti — SocArXiv — doi:10.31235/osf.io/7hv94_v1
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.