Moritz Schramm: "Emulated Guardians: Practice, Politics, and Performativity of the DSA and the Oversight Board"
How can we control private power beyond the state? How to protect individual rights in a world where traditional authority, like state sovereignty and formal law, is fading? How can we discipline expanding private power structures that shape our lives? What role does the European Union—since the 1960s a transnational leader—play in this transformation? Does its regulatory influence reach into the global, digital economy, and what mechanisms enable it to assert European rights and values, beyond market leverage?
A common response has been to repurpose public law tools to regulate private, profit-driven powers. In discussions about global commerce and informational capitalism, we—policymakers, academics, and even the private sector—aim to emulate classic public law strategies. Emulation, as explored in this book, involves replicating established models in new contexts. We’ll study two prominent examples: out-of-court dispute bodies in the EU’s Digital Services Act and Meta’s Oversight Board, which Mark Zuckerberg once called "a Supreme Court for Facebook." Both illustrate the emulation of court-like mechanisms to control content moderation on social media.
The book uses an interdisciplinary and comparative lens, drawing from law, sociology, and political science to analyze the two major digital economies: Europe and the United States.
The thesis was awarded the Konrad Redeker Prize of Humboldt University of Berlin (2024), the Best Dissertation Award of the European Public Law Organization (Athens, 2024), and the First Prize for the Best Thesis in Law by the European Law Faculties Association (Edinburgh, 2024), and was shortlisted for the Doctoral Award of the World Business Law Institute of the International Chamber of Commerce (Paris, 2023). The thesis will be published under the title Governance by Emulation: Platform Adjudication, the Oversight Board, and the Digital Services Act with Cambridge University Press.
Dissertation an der Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, 2023.
