Speaking Engagements
Lukas Bühlmann speaks on echo chambers and platform regulation at the IBA conference in Seoul
On 13 November 2026, Lukas Bühlmann will speak at the IBA conference Innovation Shaping Tomorrow: Navigating the Legal Landscape in Seoul. The conference addresses current legal developments at the intersection of intellectual property, communications and technology, including sovereign AI and the Brussels effect, cybersecurity and critical infrastructure, platform liability and cross-border enforcement, and liability for AI agents and robotics.
In the panel Echo chambers and their regulation, Lukas Bühlmann, a member of the Advisory Board of the IBA Technology Law Committee, will present the regulatory landscape in the European Union and Switzerland.
Social media feeds and recommendation systems show users more of the content they already engage with. How far this deepens polarisation and susceptibility to misinformation remains contested among researchers, and that uncertainty is part of the regulatory difficulty: no jurisdiction regulates echo chambers as such, and the instruments that do exist each govern something adjacent.
The EU Digital Services Act reaches the design of recommender systems and systemic risk, but not viewpoint diversity. The Political Advertising Regulation (EU) 2024/900 came closest to the mechanism itself by restricting the targeting of political messages; its practical effect was that Meta and Google withdrew from political advertising in the EU altogether.
Switzerland is taking its own path. The draft Federal Act on Communication Platforms and Search Engines adopts the transparency, notice, complaints and dispute-settlement machinery of the Digital Services Act, but not its duty to mitigate systemic risk. On 14 October 2026 the Federal Council took note of the consultation results and instructed the department to submit a bill to Parliament by the end of June 2027, with an expanded regime for the protection of minors and with AI search engines expressly within scope. Because the draft applies on an effects basis regardless of where a provider is established, the extraterritorial reach runs in both directions: Swiss companies offering services in the EU come under the Digital Services Act, and foreign platforms reaching Swiss users will come under the Swiss act.
The panel will also discuss where regulation meets its limits in freedom of expression and user privacy.
Lukas Bühlmann will be joined by Takehiro Kaneko (TMI Associates, Tokyo), Ji Hye Seol (Yoon & Yang, Seoul) and Panupan Udomsuvannakul (Chandler MHM, Bangkok). Sun Hee Kim (Yulchon, Seoul) and Sajai Singh (JSA, Bengaluru) will moderate.
The conference is presented by the IBA Intellectual Property, Communications and Technology Section and its committees. It brings together legal practitioners from around the world to discuss how innovation is reshaping legal, commercial and regulatory frameworks.
Date: 11 to 13 November 2026
Session: 13 November 2026, 14.45–16.00
Venue: The Westin Josun Seoul, 106 Sogong-ro, Jung-gu, Seoul, South Korea
Programme and registration: IBA website
