The seminar on children's contracts for digital services gave me new perspectives on how civil law questions arise in digital environments and how areas of law merge in practice. The starting point – children's in-game microtransactions and contracts concluded at the press of a button – may at first sight be seen as a traditional contract law question. But during the seminar it became clear that the problem cannot be understood within a single area of law.

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Questions of children's legal capacity and parents' responsibility are classic civil law themes, but here they interact with the protective rules of consumer law, data protection law's view of children's data and the marketing law rules on commercial practices. It became clear that the legal order in practice meets the child not only as a contracting party, but at the same time as a consumer, a user and a holder of rights. For me, this raised questions about how we structure legal problems: the traditional division into areas of law does not always reflect how situations actually look.

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Another important reflection concerned which interests are set against one another. In classic civil law, one often thinks in terms of two equal parties with opposing economic interests. Here the situation is different. The child, the parent, the platform company and society's interest in protection meet in the same situation, and the imbalance of power and information is clear. This gave me a perspective on how the law sometimes has to deal with more complex patterns of interests than traditional two-party relationships.

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Germaine highlighted how these questions are dealt with in other jurisdictions by taking Brazil as an example, where the country has tackled the problem by legislating in the area. That parallel, in particular how Brazil approached the question entirely differently from Europe and the United States, was interesting and raised larger questions for me about how culture and cultural values influence global issues, and how service providers need to think in a more global way when making their products available on the global market.

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The seminar thus gave not only knowledge of a specific area, but a broader perspective on how civil law functions in a digital context. It became clear that new technical environments not only create new regulatory needs, but also challenge how we think about contracts, responsibility and protection. I will take that perspective with me in how I analyse similar questions in future.