Martin Husovec
The DSA has many components but, in its essence, it is a digital due process regulation bundled with risk-management tools. But will these tools work? My main concern about the DSA resides also in its strength – it relies on societal structures that the law can only foresee and incentivize but cannot build; only people can. These structures, such as local organisations analysing threats, consumer groups helping content creators, and communities of researchers, are the only ones to give life to the DSA’s tools.
Continue reading >>
Alexandra Geese
The rise of extremist right-wing governments, as observed recently in Italy, is closely linked to the business models of large digital platforms such as Facebook and YouTube. Their algorithms polarise debates and stir up emotions because that enables them to keep people on their screens for longer and show them advertising. The European Union’s Digital Services Act is the framework to address this dangerous development.
Continue reading >>
Sebastian Becker Castellaro, Jan Penfrat
While the DSA has just been crafted carefully enough to avoid major damage to digital rights in the EU, it has focussed so much on who must delete what kind of content within which time frame, that it missed the bigger picture: no content moderation policy in the world will protect us from harmful online content as long as we do not address the dominant, yet incredibly damaging surveillance business model of most large tech firms.
Continue reading >>
Daphne Keller
The European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) is a major milestone in the history of platform regulation. Other governments are now asking themselves what the DSA’s passage means for them. The DSA is a far better law than most that have been proposed in other parts of the world. I have encouraged U.S. lawmakers to emulate it in many respects. But lawmakers around the world should view it as a starting point, rather than an end point, in considering potential regulations in their own countries. T
Continue reading >>
Pietro Ortolani
Content moderation is not only an Internet governance problem; it is also, unavoidably, a form of de facto adjudication. When observed in detail, the “procedure before substance” approach of the DSA leaves many questions unanswered. The final text of the Regulation contains compromises and blind spots.
Continue reading >>
Nayanatara Ranganathan
The DSA considers advertising and recommender systems as deserving of regulatory attention, and not immutable facets of an online world. But even as the regulation furthers current standards in disclosures around online advertising, it insulates advertising business models and consolidates platform efforts to sidestep the operative question that characterizes online advertising: how and why advertisements reach who they reach, in less abstract terms.
Continue reading >>
Catalina Goanta
The question of the DSA's enforcement has already been getting considerable attention, with one of the main concerns being that the resources put forth by the European Commission are too humble when compared to the DSA’s far-reaching goals. More concerningly, the DSA leaves loopholes and grey areas in respect to native advertising and the influencer economy.
Continue reading >>
Aleksandra Kuczerawy
The DSA provides a whole set of notice and action mechanisms to address online harms. The codified mechanisms, together with detailed procedures, are foreseen for content that is illegal but also for content incompatible with platforms’ terms and conditions. But the DSA has also another goal, to ensure that the new rules respect fundamental human rights. While definitely a good step towards more effective protection of users’ rights, the true effect of the provided remedies will depend on their practical implementation. Some elements of the new regime may be a bold experiment the result of which is not fully predictable.
Continue reading >>
Tomiwa Ilori
The EU is notorious for using regulatory solutions like the DSA to dominate and pre-empt global digital standards. Often, the major conversations on the international impacts of EU laws have oscillated between capture and actually providing normative leadership on thorny aspects of digital regulation. African countries should develop their own content regulation rules by paying more attention to their contexts and consider aspects of the DSA only where they will improve such local rules.
Continue reading >>
Nicolo Zingales
The DSA adopts a meta-regulatory approach. While the shift to a meta-regulatory model should be welcomed for enabling reflexive and adaptive regulation, we must also be weary of its risk of collapsing in the absence of well-resourced and independent institutions. Indeed, this risk affects the extent to which the exportation of the DSA outside Europe would be in the public interest.
Continue reading >>
Folkert Wilman
When assessing the liability rules in the DSA it is evident that the its emphasis has been on preservation of the E-Commerce Directive's rules. However, that does not mean that nothing at all has changed. In fact, a closer look reveals that in some respects a notable evolution has taken place.
Continue reading >>
Asha Allen
The EU’s Digital Services Act introduces novel mandatory due diligence obligations for online platforms to address potential societal risks posed by the provision of their services - including the risk of online gender based violence. If effectively implemented, these provisions have the potential to set important standards for tackling some of the most pervasive harms of the digital ecosystem.
However, these efforts will require the adoption of an intersectional methodology, otherwise they will simply fail to provide the necessary mechanisms for those most acutely impacted by these rights violations.
Continue reading >>
Alessandro Mantelero
The attention to fundamental rights in the new wave of EU digital regulation, confirmed in the Digital Services Act, is a significant step towards a more articulated and appropriate framework for protecting people in a context characterised by pervasive technologies that are often developed without adequate consideration of their impact on society. However, existing practices in human rights impact assessment show some limitations in being extended to the digital context.
Continue reading >>
Julian Jaursch
The Digital Services Act requires EU member states to name a “Digital Services Coordinator” (DSC) to coordinate national regulators involved in platform oversight. But the DSCs are more than just “coordinators,” as they have to fulfill specific oversight tasks themselves. That is why member states should resist the temptation to build a small-scale coordinator and instead build a strong DSC with skills in data analysis, community management and flexible case-based work.
Continue reading >>
Ilaria Buri
The Digital Services Act has landed on an increased centralization of its enforcement powers in the hands of the European Commission. The rationale behind this centralized enforcement is understandable, particularly in light of the experience with GDPR enforcement. At the same time, it raises crucial questions about the future recurrence of such centralizaion in the Commission's hands, and the separation of powers more broadly.
Continue reading >>
Joris van Hoboken, Ilaria Buri, João Pedro Quintais, Ronan Fahy, Naomi Appelman, Marlene Straub
The Digital Services Act (DSA) has finally been published in the Official Journal of the European Union on 27 October 2022. This publication marks the end of a years-long drafting and negotiation process, and opens a new chapter: that of its enforcement, practicable access to justice, and potential to set global precedents.
Continue reading >>
The Digital Services Act (DSA) Observatory is a project run by the Institute for Information Law (IViR) at the University of Amsterdam. The DSA Observatory acts as a hub of expertise with respect to the “Digital Services Act” legislation and aims to provide independent scientific input during the DSA debate and to engage different stakeholders on the DSA, in particular on the challenge of confronting platform power from a fundamental rights and democratic values perspective.
