The third Florence forum on digital regulation will address the intersection of platform governance, media pluralism, and democratic resilience at a critical juncture for the European Union's (EU) digital regulatory framework. 

We will examine whether the current convergence of European regulatory reviews, implementation, and enforcement contributes to the overall coherence of the digital acquis, understood as the body of EU rules and obligations governing the online ecosystem.

Specifically, the Forum will explore how the digital acquis can foster clearer standards for transparency, accountability, and editorial responsibility regarding newsfluencers , alongside the adequacy of existing regulatory instruments in addressing political advertising. Ultimately, it aims to clarify how to ensure uniform enforcement across Member States and define the governance architecture required to streamline these obligations into an integrated regulatory framework.

Two years into the application of the Digital Services Act (DSA), with the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA) and the Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising (TTPA) now in force and the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act's obligations progressively taking effect, the EU's digital acquis is entering a phase of concrete implementation gaps and overlaps. This is the natural consequence of an acquis built through parallel legislative tracks whose interaction was never systematically designed. Yet fragmentation in the rules is only part of the problem: the actors and dynamics that shape democratic discourse today do not fit neatly into the categories the framework was built around. Can this moment of overlapping reviews, implementation, and enforcement help bring coherence to the digital acquis as a whole?

Currently, obligations on Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs), gatekeeper duties, systemic risk requirements for general-purpose AI, and media-specific protections can overlap, conflict, or leave enforcement grey zones, particularly for national regulatory authorities operating at the intersection of multiple frameworks. Rather than treating any single instrument as a sectoral exercise, this is the moment to step back, map the overlaps, and clarify how the different pieces of the digital acquis fit together.

Achieving this alignment is a conditio sine qua non for addressing another challenge: the effectiveness of EU tools in protecting democratic discourse in a rapidly evolving information environment. In this context, three areas in particular call for discussion, each addressing a distinct dimension of this challenge:

Newsfluencers and the changing landscape of public information

Content creators who curate, reframe, and distribute news to large audiences have become a primary source of information for many citizens, particularly younger ones, and often enjoy higher levels of trust than legacy media. Yet they operate largely outside existing regulatory frameworks. The question is whether and how the EMFA, the TTPA, the AVMSD review, and other instruments can help establish clearer rules on transparency, accountability, and editorial responsibility for actors whose influence on political opinion formation is now undeniable.

Political advertising, disinformation, and the limits of transparency

The TTPA (the Regulation on the transparency and targeting of political advertising), whose core obligations became applicable in October 2025, represents a significant step toward transparency and accountability in the digital political sphere. Yet its implementation has already revealed tensions that go beyond compliance: both Google and Meta announced their exit from the EU political advertising market due to legal uncertainties. This raises questions about whether withdrawal brings more unintended consequences than regulated transparency. At the same time, the boundaries of the regulation remain contested: what really counts as political advertising? Is the current regulatory toolkit adequate to address the evolving landscape of political communication online?

Governing the digital acquis: authorities, coordination, and enforcement

The effectiveness of the EU's digital regulatory framework depends not only on the quality of individual instruments but on the capacity of the institutional ecosystem to implement them coherently. National regulatory authorities now operate at the intersection of multiple frameworks, with overlapping mandates, differing institutional cultures, and uneven resources. Questions of jurisdictional allocation, cooperation between Digital Services Coordinators, competition authorities, data protection authorities, and media regulators, and the role of the European bodies overseeing each instrument remain insufficiently resolved. How can enforcement be made consistent across member states, and what governance architecture is needed to turn a patchwork of obligations into a functioning regulatory system?

Through keynote addresses, panel discussions, and practitioner roundtables, the Forum will bring together European institutions, national regulatory authorities, digital platforms, civil society organisations, and researchers to identify concrete pathways for regulatory coordination and to stress-test the EU's framework against the realities of platform-mediated democracy.

The Third Florence Forum on Digital Regulation is organised by the Florence Observatory on Digital Regulation (FLODIR), a joint initiative of the Centre for a Digital Society (CDS) and the Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom (CMPF) at the EUI Robert Schuman Centre, in collaboration with the Department of Legal Studies of the University of Florence.