PEReN presents its first activity report

Bruno Le Maire, Minister of Economy, Jean-Noël Barrot, Minister of Digital Affairs and Rima Abdul-Malak, Minister of Culture were presented with the first activity report for the year 2021 of the Pôle d’Expertise de la Régulation Numérique (PEReN).

PEReN presents its first activity report

PEReN is a national service created in 2020 and attached to the General Directorate of Enterprises. It is a center of expertise in data science that can be mobilized by government departments and independent administrative authorities. Its mission is to analyze the functioning of digital platforms to enable the competent authorities to adapt or implement regulations.

2021, strong growth in activity and unprecedented coordination between regulators

In its first full year of operation, PEReN has been able to quickly become operational to conduct the 25 projects it has been entrusted with to meet the needs of its partners.

PEReN has thus come to support the regulators, endeavoring to play an articulation and technical coordination role. In 2021, it has more specifically:

  • 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 draft Privacy Sandbox solution ;
  • 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 work on the regulation of artificial intelligence.

In 2022, the momentum that has been built up accelerates sharply, following the roadmap validated by the ministers in charge and with some 60 projects.

Mobilizing a team of experts, doctors or engineers, with specialized and rare skills and knowledge in data science (algorithms, machine learning/artificial intelligence, application programming), PEReN has quickly established itself as a reference and coordinating actor within the public authorities concerning all the technical aspects of the regulation of digital platforms. It carries out all of its projects with its own human and material resources, in a logic of sovereignty and capitalization of expertise within the public authorities.

Nicolas Deffieux, Director of PEReN: “With modest means in relation to 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”.