Topic: Tech regulation insights

The Minister of Public Safety recently announced Canada’s first Sensitive Technology List (STL). The STL identifies the government’s priority categories of new technologies for regulation to safeguard Canadian national security.

The EU AI Act’s prohibitions came into effect on 2 February 2025 and carry fines of 7% worldwide annual turnover for non-compliance. The prohibitions at Article 5 and accompanying recitals (particularly recitals 28-44) set out a complex set of provisions.

The European Commission (EC) published a communication on an EU toolbox for safe and sustainable e-commerce, complementing investigations under the DSA into e-commerce platform Shein, and a coordinated investigation by the EU's Consumer Protection Network.

The EU’s AI Act imposes extensive obligations on the development and use of AI.

Ofcom has published its guidance for implementing age assurance measures for regulated service providers. User-to-user (U2U) services and search services take note: a decision not to implement highly effective age assurance measures means that your service may be deemed by Ofcom to be accessible by children.

Earlier this year we looked at trends in M&A investment in the technology sector, highlighting the TMT sector was the best performing sector in 2023 in terms of deal value and volume. The sector has remained fairly subdued this year, but are there signs this could be changing? We explore with our colleagues in the UK, Europe and China the outlook for the sector in their regions, and the impact of regulation on M&A investment in the tech sector.

We have published an article, EU: An overview of the European digital strategy, explaining the aims and key components of the EU digital strategy, outlining at a high-level key legislation that has been published in this space in the past three years and highlighting the way in which the various legislative instruments interact with each other and with European data privacy rules.

As public awareness of Web 3.0, the metaverse and other associated technologies increases, there is further pressure on governments, businesses and regulatory bodies to keep abreast of both the possibilities and the risks of these new worlds.

The usage and adoption of artificial intelligence (which refer to broadly herein to also include the application of AI to analytics of large data sets and in the context of machine learning (which includes the subsets of ML operations and deep learning)) has increased significantly over the past few years.

In 2020, the European Commission published its central digital policy document “Shaping Europe’s Digital Future” which outlined its digital strategy for the next five years.