From GMOs to Online Platforms: Gatekeeping Powers and Executive Authority in EU Internal Market Risk Regulation

Abstract

The European Commission has long been the institution that converts indeterminate risk into binding administrative decisions, deciding, for instance, over the market access of GMOs, plant protection products, and chemicals whenever national opinions on their safety diverge. The Digital Services Act (DSA) now assigns it a similar role: determining whether platform features should be disallowed because of the risks they pose to the Union. Unlike these traditional frameworks, however, the Commission decides unilaterally, unconstrained by comitology votes, national safeguards, or mandatory expert opinion. Juxtaposing the DSA against this older regulatory tradition, I show that its systemic risk framework marks a departure toward unchecked executive discretion. I argue that this departure is not the product of a Commission power grab but of compensatory centralisation: an institutional design compensating for the loss of regulatory control by Member States of destination, rather than a deliberate expansion of executive reach. In that sense, it exemplifies what Chiti and Mendes describe as the ‘age of functionalism’, where institutional design is driven by temporary workability rather than normative ambition. The result is a framework in which systemic risk, an inherently contested and politically saturated concept, is adjudicated through an unconstrained dialogue between the Commission and the world’s most powerful platform firms. This compensatory centralisation raises pressing questions about its long-term tenability in light of political resistance and its democratic legitimacy more broadly.

Keywords: risk regulation, platform regulation, executive power, GMOs, Digital Services Act, functionalism, indeterminacy, European Commission.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution − Non-Commercial − No Derivatives 4.0 International License.

Suggested citation: F Blommaert, ‘From GMOs to Online Platforms: Gatekeeping Powers and Executive Authority in EU Internal Market Risk Regulation’ (2026) 22 CYELP (‘Online First’).