EU Consumer Law, Privatization, and Digital Policy Legislation

The overall hypothesis which we would like to debate broadly through this special issue is that EU Consumer Law is being gradually dissolved or superseded by the EU’s digital policy legislation – the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Digital Market Act (DMA), the Digital Services Act (DSA), the Data Act (DA) and the Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA). The huge impact of the GDPR is visible not only in the academic discourse and the invention of “Consumer Data Protection Law”, but also through the fast-growing case law of the European Court of Justice affecting business-to-consumer (B2C) relations. Many, if not most, of these cases concern the digitalisation of the economy and society. The DMA, the DSA, the DA and the AIA have not yet come to be considered by the European Court of Justice (CJEU), but it will likely only be a matter of a couple of years before the CJEU will start to rule on matters within their scope. The purpose of the special issue is to go beyond fragmentation and privatization by initiating a debate about the substance of future EU Consumer Law, whether it is fit for the digital economy and whether and which changes have to be made, perhaps through a new “Digital Fairness Act” which addresses all potential questions and clarifies the commonalities and differences between the industrial consumer world and industrial consumer law, and the digital consumer world and digital consumer law.