Some organizations are awarding qualifications that reflect a normal distribution profile of passes and grades, despite the pandemic’s impact on education. While helping assuage student and parent demands, and ensuring continuity of entry to universities, training, or employment, this potentially misrepresents actual skills, as these qualifications represent a certain level of competence. Without these skills, economies won’t have enough skilled workers and individuals may find their career mobility hampered. Exploring the responses of TVET institutions to changed evaluation criteria and identifying their assessment of competency shortfalls and impact on progression into employment, can help empower educators, governments, students, and businesses.

As part of the Digital Markets Act, the EU Commission has proposed a new competition tool to address market power in the digital economy that is dominated by large online platforms. While limiting the power of US-based tech companies, such as Google or Facebook, can be helpful, we argue that limiting competition is not enough. Business models based on invasion of privacy and behavior modification are at the root of the associated problems stemming from their use are at the root of challenges to democracy and sustainability — in order to protect democracy and support sustainable development, Europe needs to develop alternatives to the current behaviorally targeted advertising business model. This policy brief discusses current alternatives to business models based on invasion of privacy and behavior modification, arguing that current alternatives need further development before implementation. To further support the development of new business models we argue in favor of regulatory sandboxes, digital ad revenue tax, reducing accumulation of data to technical necessity only, and adapting procedures and ethics from human subjects research.