Automated Private Enforcement: Evidence from the Google Fonts Case

Plaintiffs often have little incentive to detect and enforce small claims, which reduces defendants’ incentives to comply. With advances in artificial intelligence, can automated private enforcement increase compliance? The Google Fonts Case offers a unique opportunity to explore this question. After a German court ruled that the dynamic embedding of Google Fonts violated the GDPR, an entrepreneurial lawyer in Austria used automated tools to detect violations and threaten website operators with lawsuits. Drawing on a comprehensive sample of 1,517,429 websites across 32 European countries over a two-year period, we use a difference-in-difference approach to show a significant compliance effect in Austria. Within three months, non-compliance dropped by 22.7 percentage points, a nearly 50% reduction. These findings suggest that automated private enforcement can be highly disruptive, pressuring policymakers to recalibrate legal rules.

Alexander Stremitzer is Professor of Law, Economics, and Business in ETH Zurich. His research and teaching interests include theoretical and experimental law and economics, contracts, business bankruptcy, and contract design. His research has appeared in German and English, including publications in the Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization, the Journal of Law & Economics, Games & Economic Behavior, the Yale Law Journal and the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology. He served as Robert Braucher Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School in 2023.

Moderator: Benjamin Chen, Associate Professor & Director of the Law and Technology Centre, The University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law

To register, please go to https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_regform.aspx?guest=Y&UEID=98069. A paper will be circulated in advance and attendees will be expected to have read the paper before the seminar.