The Digital Equality Turn in the EU: How the AI Act and Platform Regulations Operationalise Non-Discrimination

Mezei, Kitti and Träger, Anikó (2025) The Digital Equality Turn in the EU: How the AI Act and Platform Regulations Operationalise Non-Discrimination. HUNGARIAN JOURNAL OF LEGAL STUDIES. ISSN 2498-5473 (In Press)

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Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly shapes access to work, services, and opportunities across the EU, but its opacity and reliance on biased data pose profound challenges for the principle of non-discrimination. Traditional equality law, designed to address direct and identifiable harms, struggles to capture the indirect, systemic, and often hidden forms of disadvantage generated by algorithmic systems. This paper examines case studies—including COMPAS, Amazon’s hiring tool, Apple Card, and platform management systems like Deliveroo and Uber Eats—to illustrate how seemingly neutral algorithms reproduce or even amplify existing inequalities. It then analyses why such harms map imperfectly onto EU anti-discrimination law, highlighting evidentiary barriers, proxy discrimination, and the law’s limited reach across grounds and sectors. Against this backdrop, the paper situates the AI Act alongside the Digital Services Act, Digital Markets Act, and Platform Work Directive as part of a broader “digital equality turn.” These instruments embed preventive obligations—such as bias-resistant data governance, transparency, systemic risk oversight, and accountability for algorithmic management—that operationalise non-discrimination within digital regulation. Rather than displacing equality law, this emerging framework extends its logic into the algorithmic domain, reframing non-discrimination as a matter of design, governance, and risk management. The paper argues that the effectiveness of this framework will depend on institutional coordination between equality bodies, market surveillance authorities, and courts to ensure that digital equality protections are not merely theoretical but enforceable in practice.

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