Inge Graef

Inge Graef is Associate Professor of Competition Law at Tilburg University. She is the Vice Dean for Research at Tilburg Law School and the director of the Tilburg Graduate Law School. Inge is affiliated with the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society (TILT) and the Tilburg Law and Economics Center (TILEC). 

Inge holds expertise in the areas of competition law, platform regulation and the governance of data-driven innovation. She 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.

Inge is particularly interested in the interaction of competition law and digital regulation with other legal regimes, such as intellectual property, data protection and consumer law, from a substantive as well as an institutional and enforcement perspective. 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). From 2022 to 2024, she was the research director of TILT, leading the institute's overall research program.

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.

Between 2022 and 2024, Inge coordinated 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). From 2018 to 2023, she was appointed as a member of the European Commission's expert group to the EU Observatory on the Online Platform Economy during its first and second terms. Between 2019 and 2021, Inge 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 leads the legal part of the AI4POL Horizon Europe project (2025-2027), with the full title 'Using Artificial Intelligence to Support Regulators & Policy Makers'. The legal part of the AI4POL project aims at future-proofing the governance of and by AI by designing governance frameworks to help regulators maximize the benefits and minimize the risks of AI and data technologies in selected areas from a multidisciplinary perspective.

Inge is also the Principal Investigator for Tilburg University of the INCA Horizon Europe project (2022-2026), which stands for INcrease Corporate political responsibility and Accountability. The project investigates the impact that digital platforms, and in particular the so-called GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft) have on European democracies and institutions.

She has been involved in various policy studies commissioned by the European Commission, the Belgian, Dutch and German government on topics such as the effectiveness of abuse of dominance enforcement, 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.

Inge currently acts as editor of the Journal of Competition Law & Economics and 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.