EU Digital Fitness Check

The ‘EU Digital Fitness Check’ comes at the right time, as legal certainty and cross-border coherence are structural prerequisites for a functioning digital single market and a competitive European economy. Accordingly, the EU must give these issues high priority in the coming months, especially in light of accelerated technological developments and growing interdependencies.

Henning Vöpel, Director of the cep, says: “A market-based economic order needs rules that are comprehensible and enforceable. The EU’s digital legal framework has grown faster than its coherence and consistency have been maintained. This is the main problem that the Digital Fitness Check must solve: It should envision a robust and intelligent framework, rather than focusing on individual legal provisions.” Anselm Küsters, Head of the Digitalisation and New Technologies Division at cep, notes: “For the first time, generative AI offers regulators a scalable tool to interpret their own regulatory framework in the same way that practitioners do: across instruments, languages, and legal areas. The question is whether the Commission will integrate these capabilities into the legislative process in a timely manner.”

The cep researchers see further structural problems in the interoperability obligations of the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which, at a technical level, can all too easily come into conflict with the EU’s obligations in the areas of data protection and cybersecurity. The underlying conflicts cannot be resolved through enforcement alone, but require clear political objectives and priorities – not least to counter populist criticism of a technocratic EU.

The cybersecurity implications deserve particular attention here. The Cyber Resilience Act requires companies to adopt ‘security by design’, whilst the DMA mandates that system-level interfaces be opened up to third parties. Philipp Eckhardt, cep expert on information technologies, comments: “Interoperability requirements that interfere with a platform’s security-critical architecture force regulators to make explicit trade-off decisions between competition and security objectives. Making these trade-offs after the fact, or not at all, is a structural risk.”

Background

The ‘EU Digital Fitness Check’ is a consultation process to assess the suitability of EU digital regulations and part of a European Commission package to simplify these regulations, which was presented at the end of 2025. The aim is a systematic review of the EU’s digital regulatory framework for inconsistencies and disproportionate burdens. The public consultation ran until 11 March 2026. Based on the comments received, the Commission intends to present concrete proposals for simplification.