I just came back from Frankfurt, and I spent an unhealthy amount of time talking about digital policies while looking at stairs. My conclusion is simple. Europe tries to regulate the digital world but keeps tripping in the physical one.
That is partly biographical. My father had serious mobility problems. For years I told my parents I did not bring them to Europe because I missed the United States. The truth was simpler. After a few attempts, I could not bring myself to drag him through that landscape again, with its basement bathrooms, narrow doors, and entrances with a single step that might as well have been a wall.
What makes this harder to ignore now is the contrast with Europe’s digital ambition. Brussels is revisiting its flagship rules for the online world, reworking GDPR and other omnibus packages that were meant to set the global standard for tech governance. Yet the lived experience of those rules, even for experts, is often a maze of cookie banners, consent fatigue, and legal uncertainty. The rhetoric is user-centric. The implementation rarely feels that way.
Meanwhile, the physical world where people with limited mobility have to live their lives still looks like an afterthought. Across European cities the pattern is consistent. A large share of charming cafés, small shops, and older public venues lack a step-free entrance. Accessible bathrooms are missing, hidden, or reachable only by stairs. Heritage exemptions and slow renovation cycles turn basic mobility into a lottery.
Europe can choreograph in detail how websites should ask for consent, but it cannot guarantee that someone in a wheelchair will be able to enter a restaurant or reach a toilet without pain. Digital rights are treated as a beloved acquis. Physical accessibility is subsidiarity.
The United States gets plenty wrong on regulation, but the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) did something simple and powerful. It set a clear baseline for physical accessibility in most public venues: wide doors, step-free entry, and at least one accessible restroom layout. It is not perfect. It is predictable. And for someone with mobility problems, that predictability is worth more than any number of pristine consent banners.
If European institutions want to get better at governing technology, there is a straightforward place to practice. Start by regulating the parts of the world where users cannot click anything and cannot simply walk away. Start where failure has immediate physical consequences, and where people with the least freedom of movement feel every design decision.
A regulatory culture that knows how to remove a step, widen a door, and enforce those rules consistently will be much closer to one that can also design digital rules that work in practice. Until then, it is hard to take talk of user-centric digital policy entirely seriously when so many people still cannot get through the front door.