Vagelis Papakonstantinou is Professor of Personal Data Protection Law at the Faculty of Law & Criminology of the Free University of Brussels (VUB, Vrije Universiteit Brussel), focusing on cybersecurity, intellectual property and the broader topic of technology regulation. He works through the Cyber and Data Security Lab, for which he is the scientific coordinator, as well as through VUB's Research Group on Law Science Technology & Society (LSTS) and the Brussels Privacy Hub.

Paul de Hert is Professor at the Faculty of Law & Criminology at the VUB and an associate professor at the Law School/Tilburg Institute for Law and Technology (TILT), University of Tilburg. He is Director of the VUB's Research Group on Human Rights, Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Law & Criminology, and a former director of the LSTS and of the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Law.

Acknowledgements vii

List of abbreviations viii

1 Introduction 1

PART 1

The change of paradigm in the EU's regulation of digital technologies: 'act-ification' at play 13

2 Popular names instead of alphanumeric titles for EU laws regulating digital technologies 15

3 The titles of EU legal acts 22

4 Is act-ification useful? 28

PART 2

'GDPR mimesis' in (all?) EU regulatory initiatives related to digital technologies 39

5 'GDPR mimesis': has the success of the GDPR dulled the EU legislator's imagination? 41

6 The EU data protection model and its embodiment in the GDPR 54

7 Is GDPR mimesis useful for the regulation of digital technologies? 64

PART 3

The 'brutality' of EU legislation on new digital technologies 71

8 The 'regulatory brutality' of EU law when regulating digital technologies 73

9 Basic principles of EU law and the regulation of digital technologies 85

10 Why is regulatory brutality a problem when regulating digital technologies in the EU? 95

PART 4

A new paradigm for EU law 105

11 The current reality of digital technologies in Europe 107

12 The European way for the digital age 120

Index 135