The Pôle d’Expertise de la Régulation Numérique (PEReN), a national service created on August 31, 2020, recently submitted its first activity report for the year 2021 to its supervisory ministers, Bruno Le Maire, Minister of Economy, Finance and Industrial and Digital Sovereignty, Rima Abdul Malak, Minister of Culture, and Jean-Noël Barrot, Minister Delegate in charge of the Digital Transition and Telecommunications.
Reporting to the Director General of Enterprises for its administrative and financial management, PEReN’s mission is to analyze the functioning of digital platforms to enable the competent authorities to adapt or implement regulations.
It provides expertise and technical assistance in the field of data science to all government agencies involved in the regulation of digital platforms (independent administrative authorities, ministerial departments). It provides IT tools, studies and digital consulting and is also involved in exploratory or scientific research projects.
PEReN mobilizes a team of high-level datascientists and developers, PhDs or engineers, with rare technical skills in data analysis, source code, processing and algorithmic auditing used by digital platforms.
A consolidated intervention framework in 2022
In its first year of operation, PEReN has highlighted the need to consolidate its intervention framework. Indeed, since its creation, it has sometimes been confronted with difficulties in accessing data useful for its work, including publicly accessible data, as well as with the refusal to cooperate on the part of certain digital platforms. These difficulties, in addition to hindering the progress of the work envisaged, present the risk of leading to ill-adapted regulatory tools.
Article 36 of the law on the regulation and protection of access to cultural works in the digital age provides for the granting of a government department with the power to collect publicly accessible data on the sites of platform operators in order to conduct experiments. Its application was specified in April 2022 by a decree in the Council of State, issued after the opinion of the Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés (CNIL), which designates PEReN as the service referred to in Article 36 of the law.
PEReN’s framework for action is now defined in three main ways:
- PEReN can establish agreements with government departments or independent regulators involved in the regulation of digital platforms;
- PEReN may build prototypes of regulatory tools on its own initiative, and may for this purpose exclusively collect publicly available data, without the platforms being able to object;
- PEReN can conduct public research.
Assessment of the year 2021: strong growth in activity and unprecedented coordination between regulators
During this first full year of operation, PEReN carried out 18 projects listed on its 2021 roadmap, to which 7 additional projects were added. PEReN has thus come to support the regulators, endeavoring to play a role of articulation and technical coordination. In 2021, it has notably:
- developed mutualizable technical solutions: platform for secure data exchange in the context of the implementation of the ELAN law, data scraping API, audit of smartphone applications, technical analysis of Google’s Privacy Sandbox project;
- laid the groundwork for future regulatory tools for digital platforms: “black box” algorithm analysis, detection of viral content, anonymization of personal data in the context of the right to portability (RGPD), evaluation of the prevalence of bots on Twitter, exploratory study of the supply and consumption of videos on YouTube;
- contributed to the definition of recent European regulations: technical analysis of security issues in the opening of application stores (DMA), technical insight into the interoperability of online services (DMA, DSA), contribution to the work on AI regulation.
For this year 2022, the momentum initiated is accelerating strongly, the roadmap validated by the supervisory ministers is endowed with about sixty projects.
Nicolas Deffieux, director of PEReN:
“Endowed with modest means in view of its missions, PEReN has become part of an exceptional dynamic in less than two years and has already had a concrete impact by allowing, on the one hand, a technical rebalancing with digital platforms, and on the other hand, an unprecedented coordination between sectoral regulators.”
PEReN 2021 Activity Report:
https://www.peren.gouv.fr/rapports/Rapport_Activite_2021_PEReN_web.pdf
Translated from le Pôle d’Expertise de la Régulation Numérique (PEReN) présente son rapport d’activité 2021
