Workshops

Adopted on 19 October 2022, the Digital Services Act (DSA) will fully apply from 17 February 2024. The regulation carries over with some amendments to the so-called safe harbours provisions of the 2000 e-Commerce directive, but the DSA mainly creates an extensive catalog of due diligence obligations for the online platforms, in particular for the very large online platforms and search engines. The DSA also requires Member States to adopt several implementing measures, for instance for the new supervision mechanism involving Digital Services Coordinators. The European Commission will also have to devote quite a lot of resources to cope with the huge tasks of overseeing the very large players.

The new obligations imposed on digital platforms as well as their enforcement raise a lot of new issues. The workshop aims at discussing those issues.

Over the last few years, the “sharing culture” has creatively deconstructed traditional markets and changed the way we travel, commute, consume, interact with other peers. Despite its promises, the so-called sharing economy has also the potential to prompt new forms of discrimination: the architecture choices of online platforms combined with often opaque rating systems powered by algorithms are exacerbating existing biases and creating new forms of inequalities in our society.

The goal of the international workshop is to explore the different dimensions of digital discrimination in the current sharing economy, taking into consideration the discriminatory practices or effects generated by humans as well as by algorithms. The workshop will map out the discriminations existing in the sharing economy, before exploring the harm (or potential benefits) of these forms of discriminations against users (consumers and service providers). Experts will analyse the existing rules and ways to limit the risks and to foster new opportunities of the sharing economy. Stakeholders will then explore new avenues of policy reforms.