Browsing by Author "Stocker, Volker"

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Can't LLMs Do That? Supporting Third-Party Audits Under the DSA: Exploring Large Language Models for Systemic Risk Evaluation of the Digital Services Act in an Interdisciplinary Setting
(Association for Computing Machinery, 2025) Sekwenz, Marie-Therese; Gsenger, Rita; Stocker, Volker; Görnemann, Esther; Talypova, Dinara; Parkin, Simon; Greminger, Lea; Smaragdakis, Georgios
This paper investigates the feasibility and potential role of using Large Language Models (LLMs) to support systemic risk audits under the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA). It examines how automated tools can enhance the work of DSA auditors and other ecosystem actors by enabling scalable, explainable, and legally grounded content analysis. An interdisciplinary expert workshop with twelve participants from legal, technical, and social science backgrounds explored prompting strategies for LLM-assisted auditing. Thematic analysis of the sessions identified key challenges and design considerations, including prompt engineering, model interpretability, legal alignment, and user empowerment. Findings highlight the potential of LLMs to improve annotation workflows and expand audit scale, while underscoring the continued importance of human oversight, iterative testing, and cross-disciplinary collaboration. This study offers practical insights for integrating AI tools into auditing processes and contributes to emerging methodologies for operationalizing systemic risk evaluations under the DSA.
COVID-19 and the Internet: Lessons Learned
(Emerald Publishing Limited, 2023) Stocker, Volker; Lehr, William; Smaragdakis, Georgios; Whalley, Jason; Stocker, Volker; Lehr, William
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the ‘real’ world and substantially impacted the virtual world and thus the Internet ecosystem. It has caused a significant exogenous shock that offers a wealth of natural experiments and produced new data about broadband, clouds, and the Internet in times of crisis. In this chapter, we characterise and evaluate the evolving impact of the global COVID-19 crisis on traffic patterns and loads and the impact of those on Internet performance from multiple perspectives. While we place a particular focus on deriving insights into how we can better respond to crises and better plan for the post-COVID-19 ‘new nor- mal’, we analyse the impact on and the responses by different actors of the Internet ecosystem across different jurisdictions. With a focus on the USA and Europe, we examine the responses of both public and private actors, with the latter including content and cloud providers, content delivery networks, and Internet service providers (ISPs). This chapter makes two contributions: first, we derive lessons learned for a future post- COVID-19 world to inform non-networking spheres and policy-making; second, the insights gained assist the networking community in better planning for the future.
Das Ende des Teilens?
(2020) Kolleck, Aaron; Stocker, Volker
Carsharing hat sich hierzulande als ernstzunehmende Alternative für das eigene Auto und zu einem prägenden Element der Mobilitätslandschaft entwickelt. Laut Bundesverband CarSharing gibt es seit Beginn des Jahres 2020 in Deutschland rund 25.000 geteilte Pkw, die ungefähr zu gleichen Teilen auf stationsgebundene und -ungebundene Angebote entfallen. Obgleich in der Sharing Economy das Mantra „teilen statt besitzen“ den temporären und flexiblen Zugang zu oft teuren Ressourcen verspricht und so Teilhabe auch ohne exklusives Privateigentum ermöglicht, wird dieses Mantra in der aktuellen Krise zum Problem.
Data Governance Act Proposal
(Weizenbaum Institute, 2021) Neuberger, Christoph; Friesike, Sascha; Krzywdzinski, Martin; Eiermann, Karin-Irene; Stocker, Volker; Schawe, Nadine; Efroni, Zohar; von Hagen, Prisca; Völzmann, Lisa; Müller, Ferdinand
This Position Paper contains statements drafted by several Research Groups at the Weizenbaum Institute concerning the Data Governance Act (DGA) Proposal. Each statement is followed by a short explanation. The purpose of this Paper is to highlight a number of important aspects of the DGA Proposal and stimulate the debate around it with a special emphasis on the part that concerns regulation of data sharing services (Chapter III, DGA Proposal). The Paper touches upon a number of selected matters without the ambition to cover all the important issues the DGA legislation raises. The statements address the potential risks in creating a centralized architecture for data intermediaries, the problem of imposing a duty on data sharing services to offer data on a non-discriminatory basis, the role and expertise supervision authorities will need to assume and exercise and questions regarding the interface between the anticipated DGA and existing data protection law in the EU. The Paper includes a number of specific recommendations regarding the formulation of several DGA provisions, specifically in connection with its intersection points with the GDPR.
Digitale Infrastruktur
(Weizenbaum Institute, 2020-04-20) Friesike, Sascha; Stocker, Volker; Dietzel, Christoph
Ob Homeoffice, E-Learning oder Online-Shopping - in Zeiten von Corona werden viele Aktivitäten ins Internet verlagert. Doch was bedeutet die erhöhte Nachfrage für unsere digitale Infrastruktur? Wie gut sind deutsche Provider darauf vorbereitet? Und: Was lässt sich anhand des erhöhten Datenverkehrs ablesen? In der dritten Folge unserer Podcast-Reihe diskutiert Weizenbaum-Direktor Sascha Friesike mit seinen Gästen Volker Stocker (Weizenbaum-Institut | TU Berlin) und Christoph Dietzel (DE-CIX), wie sich die Corona-Krise auf die Netzinfrastruktur auswirkt.
EU Cyber Resilience Act: Socio-Technical and Research Challenges (Dagstuhl Seminar 24112)
(2024) Dalla Preda, Mila; Egelman, Serge; Mandalari, Anna Maria; Stocker, Volker; Tapiador, Juan; Vallina-Rodriguez, Narseo
This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar "EU Cyber Resilience Act: Socio-Technical and Research Challenges" (24112). This timely seminar brought together experts in computer science, tech policy, and economics, as well as industry stakeholders, national agencies, and regulators to identify new research challenges posed by the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), a new EU regulation that aims to set essential cybersecurity requirements for digital products to be permissible in the EU market. The seminar focused on analyzing the proposed text and standards for identifying obstacles in standardization, developer practices, user awareness, and software analysis methods for easing adoption, certification, and enforcement. Seminar participants noted the complexity of designing meaningful cybersecurity regulations and of aligning regulatory requirements with technological advancements, market trends, and vendor incentives, referencing past challenges with GDPR and COPPA adoption and compliance. The seminar also emphasized the importance of regulators, marketplaces, and both mobile and IoT platforms in eliminating malicious and deceptive actors from the market, and promoting transparent security practices from vendors and their software supply chain. The seminar showed the need for multi-disciplinary and collaborative efforts to support the CRA’s successful implementation and enhance cybersecurity across the EU.
Measuring Mobile Broadband: Challenges and Implications for Policymaking
(2023) Frías, Zoraida; Lehr, William; Stocker, Volker; Mendo, Luis
Mobile broadband networks constitute essential infrastructure to enable a wide range of innovative services and use cases anticipated for our digital economy future. Measuring performance is essential in many ways. First, to allow service providers to manage and develop their networks. Second, for the efficient operation of markets, and third, for evidence-based policymaking. In the rapidly evolving digital economy, capabilities for collecting more fine-grained measurements and analytics that deliver insights to enable real-time network management and localized control are expanding. As the fundamental methods used to collect measurement data are changing, the ecosystem of stakeholders with strategic interests in mobile measurement is growing and becoming more complex, posing challenges and opportunities for policymakers. Against the background of this growing complexity, this paper aims to discuss some basic features of a capable and reliable measurement ecosystem for mobile broadband. We document how the mobile broadband measurement ecosystem has changed and discuss its implications on a number of important broadband policy issues.
Next-generation networks: Necessity of edge sharing
(2023) Lehr, William; Stocker, Volker
The Internet has coped well with Covid-19, but problems remain: Evidence to House of Lords Committee exploring the impact of Covid-19
(Weizenbaum Institute, 2021) Stocker, Volker; Whalley, Jason
In this contribution to a 'call for evidence' by the House of Lords (UK), we investigate the pivotal role of the Internet during the Covid-19 pandemic. The Internet has enabled many to work from home, to shop and be educated online, and keep in touch with colleagues and friends. The swift move online of many activities raised concerns about the robustness and resilience of the Internet. Contrary to some concerns, expressed when national lockdowns were being imposed, the Internet did not collapse. However, while the Internet allowed many to work from home etc., not everyone has access to the Internet. Furthermore, there are many differences between those who do have access to the Internet - quite simply, some are able to access the Internet using connections that are a lot faster than others. This shapes what businesses and individuals can do online, with those with slower connections or connections shared between many users being disadvantaged compared to those whose connectivity is better. Finally, it is necessary to remember that not everything can move online. Some occupations, such as those with a greater knowledge content, are more amenable to the move online than those with a larger labour (physical) component.