Inge Graef

Inge Graef is Associate Professor of Competition Law at Tilburg University. She is affiliated to the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society (TILT) and the Tilburg Law and Economics Center (TILEC).

Inge is the research director of TILT, leading the institute’s overall research program. She is also the main coordinator of the Digital Legal Studies network, a collaboration between law & technology scholars at Tilburg University, the University of Amsterdam, Radboud University Nijmegen and Maastricht University funded by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW).

Inge holds expertise in the areas of competition law, platform regulation and the governance of data-driven innovation. She is particularly interested in the interaction of competition law with other legal regimes, such as intellectual property, data protection and consumer law, from a substantive as well as an institutional and enforcement perspective.

Inge also comments and advises on new legislative and policy initiatives with regard to the regulation of digital services, innovation and data, including the Digital Markets Act, the Digital Services Act, the Data Governance Act and the Data Act. Her work often has an interdisciplinary angle, combining approaches at the interface of law & economics with law & technology.

In 2017, Inge joined Tilburg Law School where she is affiliated to the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology and Society (TILT) and the Tilburg Law and Economics Center (TILEC).

Prior to joining Tilburg University, Inge worked as a researcher at the KU Leuven Centre for IT & IP Law (CiTiP) where she obtained a PhD in law. In her doctoral thesis, Inge explored the interaction between competition law and data on online platforms, and the extent to which data protection can be protected as a non-efficiency concern in competition policy. For her article 'Market Definition and Market Power in Data: The Case of Online Platforms' published in 2015, Inge won the Young Writer's Award of Kluwer Law International's journal World Competition.

After her master studies in Maastricht and Nijmegen, Inge did traineeships at the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs dealing with competition and public procurement policy issues, and at the European Commission's DG Competition where she worked on various competition investigations in the technology sector. She was also active as a paralegal in the competition practice group at the Brussels office of the international law firm Allen & Overy. 

Inge is regularly asked for her expert input and has participated in expert events organized by institutions like the Dutch Economics Ministry, the European Commission, the European Parliament, the European Data Protection Supervisor, the OECD, the US Federal Trade Commission, the International Competition Network, the Canada CIO Strategy Council and BEUC - The European Consumer Organisation.

Inge is appointed as a member of the European Commission's expert group to the EU Observatory on the Online Platform Economy. Between 2019 and 2021, she co-chaired the Digital Clearinghouse initiative, which aims to facilitate exchange of insights between regulators across Europe and beyond in the areas of competition, data protection and consumer law.

Inge is the Principal Investigator for Tilburg University of the INCA Horizon Europe project, which stands for INcrease Corporate political responsibility and Accountability. The project is led by the University of Bologna and investigates from a multidisciplinary perspective what impact digital platforms, and in particular the so-called GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft) have on European democracies and institutions. 

Inge has also been involved in various policy studies commissioned by the European Commission, the Belgian, Dutch and German government on topics such as the regulation of innovation in the platform economy, data sharing, fairness in platform-to-business relationships, net neutrality and the position of online services in the electronic communications framework.

She currently acts as associate editor of the Journal of Competition Law & Economics and as editor of TechReg. She is also a member of the International Editorial Board of Telecommunications Policy and editor of the Information Technology & Law book series published by Springer and Asser Press.

Inge held visiting appointments at the Institute of European and Comparative Law of Oxford University (2018) and at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Munich (2014).

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Outside of Tilburg University, Inge has been teaching in executive and postgraduate training programs offered by organizations like the Brussels School of Competition, the College of Europe in Bruges, the European University Institute in Florence and the Dutch Grotius Academy.