Anu Bradford Talks 'The Brussels Effect'

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
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**Stephen Carroll** (0:07)
So Professor Anu Bradford from Columbia Law School, it's been 14 years since you coined that term, The Brussels Effect, to describe the EU's global regulatory influence. If you could take us back to that point, what is it about the EU's global regulatory power that you were trying to encapsulate with that term?

**Anu Bradford** (0:25)
You know, Stephen, it was a very different world that the EU was living in. And it was the moment when the EU was extremely ambitious about building the regulations that were advancing its values around sustainability, around digital rights, and also interested in making sure that those rights are respected by foreign companies. And that then gave the EU this tremendous global, unilateral regulatory power. But it was also the world in which other dimensions of power were relatively not that more important as they are today. We didn't need to worry as much about the European military power.
And there was a particular aspect where the EU really felt that it had influence. It had the influence to shape what products were produced and consumed. And that gave the EU certain, I would say, a power that had been not fully appreciated in the conversations about global influence.

**Stephen Carroll** (1:26)
Where are we then 14 years on? Has that power, that influence diminished?

**Anu Bradford** (1:31)
I think it's fair to say that we are no longer the heyday of the Brussels Effect or regulation. I don't think it has entirely disappeared by any means. But at the same time, I would say that the EU's regulatory agenda faces tremendous challenges, both external and internal. We could not have imagined at the time that we would be having a Trump administration where the US is very aggressively attacking Europe's regulatory sovereignty, basically forcing the EU to diminish some of those regulatory ambitions. And also then the internal pushback that is coming now from companies that is causing now the EU to some extent lose its own confidence in its regulatory agenda when we are so worried about the EU's competitiveness, the EU's technological sovereignty.
And there seems to be now a narrative that may be this commitment to regulations like digital regulation is standing in the way of achieving those goals.

**Stephen Carroll** (2:32)
Well, let's talk a bit about that criticism then. I mean, how much of it is fair or legitimate that perhaps the EU did go too far in regulation? You know, are efforts that the EU is making to simplify the regulations as they put it, a step in the right direction?

**Anu Bradford** (2:49)
Well, I generally would say that any responsible regulator, especially when you are trying to regulate a fast moving space like technology, needs to engage in irregular self-reflection and assess whether we have done it the right way. And especially if you look at the number of different regulations that have been passed in Brussels, yes, there are probably some redundancies, inconsistencies, overlaps, where some simplification is in order.
So I'm not defending every provision of every rule coming out of Brussels. I think, for instance, the GDPR has been somewhat too burdensome, especially for the small and medium sized companies, and maybe inadvertently entrenched the power of the big tech, who can better afford to engage in very costly regulatory compliance.
But I'm more worried, Stephen, that this conversation is now, I think, taking too much of the political space and energy in Brussels. Because I think, even though I'm fully, 100% on board, that we need to prioritize Europe's competitiveness. We need to prioritize technological sovereignty. There's no security without prosperity. These are absolutely the right goals. But deregulation or just trying to kind of tweak the AI Act or the GDPR, they will do collectively very little to help the EU enhance that goal. So instead, I think we should be focusing on what the real problems and the sources of the so-called innovation gap between the EU and the US are. Why the EU hasn't been as successful in building those tech companies. And I would argue the reason is not ambitious digital regulation. It's the EU's failure to build those fundamental pillars of the tech ecosystem where the US has been much more successful. So the digital single market, the capital markets union, rethinking cultural and legal barriers to risk taking, like unity bankruptcy laws that deter the entrepreneurs from pursuing really cutting edge risk innovations. And I think very importantly that the EU has not been as successful as the United States in attracting global talent to innovating Europe.

**Stephen Carroll** (5:06)
So are we looking in the wrong place then to try and fix this problem, is the EU being susceptible to the influence of the Trump administration in looking at the criticism at regulation rather than tackling those underlying issues? And can you do both? Can you innovate and grow while also having strong and robust rules?