eutechlaws.org · launching soon

How much does Europe regulate tech, and does it work?

A new open dataset counts the legal obligations in every EU digital law, follows them into the implementing acts and guidance behind them, and checks what is known about their effects.

Sketch of the Berlaymont building beside an open rulebook, a gavel and a column, with rings of EU stars and circuit lines connecting them

115EU digital laws and proposals

24,300legal obligations in their texts

2.8mwords of legal text

690implementing and delegated acts adopted under them

2.3×obligations per act, EU vs US laws doing the same job

A first look

Three findings from the data

×4.2

EU tech rules aimed directly at companies have quadrupled since 2018: from 1,685 obligations at the start of 2018 to 7,106 today, in the laws themselves.

84 of 99

EU digital laws came out of negotiation in Parliament and Council with more obligations than the Commission proposed, 26% more in total.

55 of 105

adopted EU digital laws date from 2020 or later. More than half of today's digital rulebook is less than seven years old.

What's coming

Everything you need to judge the EU's digital rules

FindingsHow the rulebook grew, who it binds, how laws change in negotiation, and how they compare with US laws doing the same job.

A page for every lawAll 115 instruments: their stated aims, obligations, implementing acts, guidance, and the evidence on their effects.

The evidence595 evaluations, studies and assessments, 68 of them with a causal design, each labelled by who produced it.

Why it mattersWhat economic research says about regulation, technology adoption and Europe's productivity gap, including the counter-arguments.

Open dataThe full workbook and every figure, free to download and reuse, with the methods and validation behind them.

MethodologyHow we count obligations and code who must act, checked against hand-coded samples, in plain language.

The list of instruments builds on K. Zenner and J. S. Marcus, A dataset of EU legal and policy instruments for the digital world (CEPS, 2025). Figures are preliminary, as of October 2026, and may change before launch.