Coping With the Digital Trilemma? Trade‐Offs and Risks in EU Digital Policy

This article examines the trade-offs embedded in the European Union's digital policymaking, focusing on the tensions between fundamental rights, security, and economic competitiveness. Using a trilemma framework, the article first conceptualizes how efforts to protect fundamental rights or enhance security may inadvertently constrain innovation. To validate the framework, a computational analysis of EU digital policy documents from 1977 to 2019 is conducted to extract thousands of goal-oriented sentences and references to trade-offs using pattern matching and classification with a Large Language Model. The results suggest a clear shift from legislation centered on fundamental rights in earlier decades to complex, multi-objective frameworks. Through in-depth qualitative case studies on the GDPR, the Digital Services Act, and the AI Act, the article argues that making these trade-offs more explicit is essential to reduce regulatory uncertainty and enable effective policy learning, ultimately fostering a more democratic and resilient digital ecosystem in the European Union.