What role does constitutional law play in the digital age?
In the last couple of decades, the EU’s approach towards regulating the field of digital technologies has shifted from a liberal economic perspective to a constitutional-based approach, passing by the phase of judicial activism. If the digital environment has become an opportunity to offer cross-border services and exercise individual freedoms, on the other hand, it has also led to serious interferences with fundamental rights and the rise of private powers online, thus triggering the EU to enter a new phase of modern constitutionalism known as digital constitutionalism.
This evolution challenges the role of constitutionalism as a means for the protection of fundamental rights and the limitation of powers, especially as the first steps towards the next phase of digital constitutionalism are already being taken. While this phase will likely be characterised by the consolidation of the current approach, it will remain necessary to gain a better understanding about how the EU will address the current and upcoming challenges of the digital age for such a phase to reach its envisioned objectives. In the end, this will require cooperation and co-regulation to ensure that those constitutional safeguards that are necessary to ensure that private actors do not abuse their freedoms but rather constitute engines of democracy, while simultaneously ensuring respect for the constitutional values that we as a democratic society have agreed upon.
In this episode of The Law of Tech Podcast, I explored the role and importance of constitutional law in the digital age with Giovanni De Gregorio, postdoctoral researcher working with the Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at Oxford University Law School.
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