ABSTRACT
Despite Emanuel Macron’s programmatic speech about “the return of the state” in Internet governance and the rising prominence of notions such as “digital sovereignty”, recent attempts by the European Union and its member states to fight disinformation have encountered substantial challenges. On the basis of process tracing and interviews with key actors, the chapter argues that the European Commission and individual EU member states faced issues of power and legitimacy that forced them to opt for an overall strategy of decentred regulation in the field of disinformation. Public actors ended up cooperating with Internet giants such as Facebook and Google at almost every stage of regulation, thus ceding too much power to private actors. Within this framework of decentred regulation, private companies skillfully engaged in preemptive and conflictual cooperation, shaping regulations in ways favourable for them and causing serious legitimacy concerns in the process. The chapter argues that one way for member states and the EU as a whole to overcome the current regulatory standpoint is to increase the legitimacy of their regulatory actions by involving parliaments and the general public more both in defining disinformation and in proposing ways to address it.
