The law of the EuroStack: Re-building Europe’s digital infrastructure governance

This project seeks to develop a novel approach towards European digital infrastructure governance. It critically engages with the EuroStack initiative, but, in contrast to the EuroStack pitch, which centers infrastructure-building, this project centers questions of governance, a dimension that is arguably underexplored but of crucial importance for the funding, design, construction, operation, and maintenance of any infrastructure, including digital infrastructure.

The overarching policy question is thus: How should Europe govern its future digital infrastructure? This question, in turn, requires deeper engagement with the concept of “the stack”, the role of law in infrastructure governance in general, and particularities of European governance-through-law in particular. Despite the forward-looking orientation of the project, it is of paramount important to first examine extant approaches of European digital infrastructure governance to assess to what extent change is needed to enable effective and publicness oriented construction of novel digital infrastructure in Europe.

The resulting research questions are the following:

1. Should the concept of the “Stack” guide digital infrastructure governance? Answering this question requires interdisciplinary engagement at the intersection of systems engineering, infrastructure studies, political and regulatory theory, and law.
2. How has European law shaped digital infrastructure development so far? This requires reframing existing EU law from an infrastructural perspective. While the project itself 
   will refrain from investigating this question empirically, it seeks to lay the groundwork for such empirical explorations by clarifying the interactions between existing EU law and digital infrastructure development.
3. How can European law support digital infrastructure construction? The project seeks to map out different governance arrangements that could guide future European digital infrastructure construction. The underlying intuition is the following: re-building Europe’s digital infrastructure effectively may necessitate re-thinking and re-building European digital infrastructure governance.