Intervention Evaluation practice questions.

The EU's Digital Markets Act, whose obligations began to apply to designated gatekeepers in March 2024, lists what those firms must and must not do before any complaint has been made, whereas a competition case is opened only after conduct has been observed. Which feature of the Act does this difference identify?

• It imposes obligations in advance of any proven harm
• It replaces the national competition authorities of every member state
• It penalises a firm only once a court has found an abuse of dominance
• It applies to every company that offers a digital service in the Union

Answer: It imposes obligations in advance of any proven harm

Ex-ante rules impose duties in advance and shift the burden onto the firm to show compliance, which is why they can act faster than a case-by-case investigation. The standing error is to read the Act as ordinary competition law with larger fines.

Under the GDPR a complaint against a company is normally handled by the data protection authority of the member state in which that company has its main establishment, and several large platforms have their EU headquarters in Ireland. Which limitation of the intervention does this arrangement expose?

• Enforcement depends on the capacity of one national authority
• Personal data may then be exported without any lawful basis
• Companies established outside the European Union fall outside the regulation
• Fines are capped at a fixed sum regardless of a firm's turnover

Answer: Enforcement depends on the capacity of one national authority

Reach on paper and enforcement in practice are separate criteria: a regulation that applies across the Union can still be throttled by the caseload of one national authority. It is a capacity problem, not a gap in the law's scope.

Canada's Online News Act, passed in June 2023, required large platforms to pay news publishers for carrying links to their journalism. One platform responded by blocking news links for Canadian users from August 2023. In an evaluation of the intervention, that response is best described as

• a measurement problem, because the payments cannot be counted
• an unintended consequence that cut publishers' reach
• proof that the law was never brought into force at all
• evidence that the platform had no legal duty to comply

Answer: an unintended consequence that cut publishers' reach

The measure produced an effect its designers did not intend and did not want, and the burden fell on the publishers it was written to protect. Naming the outcome as unintended is not the same as calling the law a failure; it is the criterion against which the remaining benefits are weighed.

South Korea's shutdown law of 2011 blocked players under 16 from online games between midnight and 06:00. It was repealed in 2021, partly because many young players had simply used adult account details. Which evaluation criterion does that finding speak to?

• The financial cost of the measure to game publishers and to the state
• The time horizon over which any benefit would become visible
• Whether the measure reaches the behaviour it targets
• Whether the measure was adopted through a democratic process

Answer: Whether the measure reaches the behaviour it targets

Circumvention attacks the mechanism itself: the rule bound accounts, not people, so the behaviour it targeted continued under a different login. A measure can be cheap, popular and lawful and still miss its target.

France's law of July 2018 prohibited pupils up to the age of 15 from using mobile phones in school and applied from September 2018. Which finding would count as evidence that the intervention changed behaviour, rather than only that it was adopted?

• The law was passed by a large parliamentary majority and took effect at the start of the following school year
• Nine in ten schools had rewritten their internal rules within the first year of the law
• A national survey found that a majority of parents supported the ban when it was introduced
• Inspections after the ban recorded less phone use during breaks than comparable inspections before it

Answer: Inspections after the ban recorded less phone use during breaks than comparable inspections before it

Adoption, paper compliance and public support all sit upstream of the outcome, and an intervention is judged on what changed for the people it addressed. A measurement taken before as well as after is what turns an observation into evidence of effect.

In February 2020 a court in the Netherlands ruled that SyRI, a system that linked government data to flag individual residents as likely welfare fraud risks, was unlawful because its workings were not transparent to the people it profiled. Treated as an intervention, a judgment of this kind is best classified as

• a market incentive that raises the running cost of the system
• an educational measure aimed at the residents who were profiled
• a legal intervention that halts one deployment
• a technical standard that every comparable system must meet

Answer: a legal intervention that halts one deployment

Litigation is a distinct intervention type: it acts after deployment, binds one named system rather than a class of systems, and depends on someone with standing bringing the case. That narrow reach is exactly what an evaluation has to record.