The Digital Services Act: Enforcing Safety and Accountability Online

The Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act seek to create a safer digital arena in which users' basic rights are safeguarded, as well as to level the playing field for enterprises.

The Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Market Act (DMA) combine to establish a unified set of laws that apply throughout the EU.

They have two major objectives:

1. Establish a more secure online environment where all users' fundamental rights to access digital services are safeguarded.
2. Deliver a fair playing field to support innovation, growth, and competitiveness, both in the European Single Market and abroad.

What precisely are digital services?

Digital services include many online services, from simple websites to internet infrastructure services and online platforms.

The DSA's regulations primarily refer to online intermediaries and platforms such as online marketplaces, social networks, content-sharing platforms, app stores, and online travel and accommodation platforms

The Digital Markets Act governs gatekeeper internet platforms, which provide an important market function by mediating between businesses and consumers for critical digital services. While some services overlap with the Digital Services legislation, they are addressed differently and with separate requirements in each legislation.

Why are the DSA and DMA necessary?

Digital services have made our lives easier in countless ways—communication, shopping, information retrieval, entertainment, and more. However, with the benefits come challenges. Illegal goods and content exchange, manipulative algorithms, and misuse of online platforms for harmful purposes are concerns affecting our online experience.

In the early 2020s, despite EU efforts, gaps persisted, including powerful platforms acting as gatekeepers with unfair conditions for businesses and limited consumer choice. To address these issues, the European Union has introduced a modern legal framework prioritizing your safety, fundamental rights protection, and a fair and open online environment.

The DSA will significantly change online platform operations. Platforms must invest in new tech and processes to comply, making users able to hold them accountable. While the full impact is unclear, the DSA represents a major step in internet regulation.

The Key Goals of the Digital Services Act:

For Citizens -

1. Better protection of fundamental rights
2. More choice, lower prices
3. Less exposure to illegal content

For providers of digital services -

1. Legal certainty, harmonization of rules
2. Easier to start up and scale up in Europe

For Business users of digital services -

1. More choice, lower prices
2. Access to EU-wide markets through platforms
3. Level-playing field against providers of illegal content

For society at large -

1. Greater democratic control and oversight over systemic platforms
2. Mitigation of systemic risks, such as manipulation or disinformation

The Providers covered under the Digital Services Act

1. Intermediary services - Offering network infrastructure: Internet access providers, domain name registrars
2. Hosting services - Like cloud and web hosting services
3. Online platforms – Platforms that bring together sellers and consumers such as online marketplaces, app stores, collaborative economy platforms, and social media platforms
4. Very large online platforms – Pose particular risks in the dissemination of illegal content and societal harms. Specific rules are foreseen for platforms reaching more than 10% of 450 million consumers in Europe.

The Impact of New obligations

The Digital Services Act vastly strengthens the procedures for removing illegal content and effectively protecting users' fundamental rights online, including free speech. It also strengthens public monitoring of online platforms, particularly those that reach more than 10% of the EU's population.

The Obligations include -

• Measures to counter illegal goods, services, or content online, such as a mechanism for users to flag such content and for platforms to cooperate with “trusted flaggers”
• New obligations on traceability of business users in online market places, to help identify sellers of illegal goods or reasonable efforts by online marketplaces to randomly check whether products or services have been identified as being illegal in any official database
• Effective safeguards for users, including the possibility to challenge platforms’ content moderation decisions
• Ban certain types of targeted adverts on online platforms (when they target children or when they use special categories of personal data, such as ethnicity, political views, and sexual orientation)
• Transparency measures for online platforms on a variety of issues, including the algorithms used for recommendations
• Obligations for very large platforms and very large online search engines to prevent the misuse of their systems by taking risk-based action and by independent audits of their risk management systems
• Access for researchers to key data of the largest platforms and search engines, in order to understand how online risks evolve
• Oversight structure to address the complexity of the online space: EU countries will have the primary role, supported by a new European Board for Digital Services; for very large platforms, supervision and enforcement by the Commission

Modifications Enforced on Big Tech for DSA Compliance

The DSA imposes severe fines for noncompliance, which can amount to up to 6% of the company's global annual revenue. Companies that refuse to follow the guidelines will be unable to operate within the EU. Due to the harsh ramifications and the prospect of losing a market of about 450 million members, major social media companies have caved and stated that users will have more choice in how they engage with their platforms.

Meta: The company that operates Facebook and Instagram has said it will introduce non-personalized digital feeds.

“We’re now giving our European community the option to view and discover content on Reels, Stories, Search and other parts of Facebook and Instagram that is not ranked by Meta using these [AI recommender] systems,” Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs

Google: The Internet search giant has said it will increase how much information it provides about ads targeted at users in the EU. It will also expand data access to third-party researchers studying systemic content risks in the region.

“We will be expanding the Ads Transparency Center, a global searchable repository of advertisers across all our platforms, to meet specific DSA provisions and providing additional information on targeting for ads served in the European Union,” Google wrote in a blog post.

As the European Union's Digital Services Act takes effect, companies like Meta, Google, and Snap are adapting their platforms. They now provide more information about AI-driven content targeting and offer users the choice to opt out of digital tracking. The DSA is reshaping EU social media and e-commerce regulations, especially for major platforms like Google, Meta, Twitter, and YouTube, focusing on content moderation.