Fairness in EU digital regulation: a reflective equilibrium approach

Building on the previous chapter, this chapter aims to develop a methodology to account for how the concept of ‘fairness’ should be interpreted across the European Union's Digital Market legislation. To that extent, it proposes a specific methodological approach inspired by the Rawlsian reflective equilibrium. In practice, this approach consists in going back and forth between: (1) identifying and mapping different occurrences of fairness in the regulations adopted by the EU; (2) clustering those; (3) identifying their normative building blocks; (4) formulating preliminary interpretations; and (5) testing them back across the identified occurrences. This approach will show how a fairness prism emerges, through which the different EU digital legislative instruments can be studied in more detail.