The EU Commission already has DSA investigations pending into TikTok, Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, X and AliExpress.
ADVERTISEMENTCompanies will see more probes for non-compliance with the Digital Services Act (DSA) coming up soon, Roberto Viola, Director General of DG CONNECT, the European Commission’s technology policy department, told lawmakers Thursday.
“We are not sleeping. It’s only one year of DSA; some [of the pending] probes are almost at the last stage, at the statement of objections, and we have others coming very soon,” Viola told the Parliament’s Internal Market and Consumer Protection (IMCO) committee.
When asked by German lawmaker Andreas Schwab (EPP) about the length of the outstanding procedures, Viola said: “I agree we need to apply the DSA, but fines are extremely high, and we already have some legal challenges in front of the court.”
The DSA – under which companies need to comply with transparency and election integrity requirements – has applied to all online platforms as of last February. The largest platforms, those that have more than 45 million monthly users in the EU, needed to be ready as of August 2023.
Until now, 25 VLOPs including Amazon, LinkedIn, Meta and Temu, have been designated. The Commission started formal non-compliance investigations into platforms TikToK, Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, X and AliExpress.
Euronews reported yesterday that advertising transparency seems to be among the DSA enforcement priorities of the Commission for early next year: it commissioned a study to assess whether online platforms are compliant with those provisions.
Until now election integrity and minor protection have been high on the Commission’s list, and according to Viola they will continue to be.
In a statement today, the Irish Coimisiún na Meán – the regulator in charge of DSA compliance in Ireland – said that it will conduct a formal review of online platform’s systems after concerns that people are having issues reporting illegal content to them.
Under the DSA, online platforms must have easy to access and user-friendly ways for users to report illegal content. The platforms checked are TikTok, X, YouTube, Meta, LinkedIn, Temu, Pinterest, Shein, Etsy, Dropbox, Hostelworld and Tumblr: they all have their EU headquarters in Ireland.
