On Friday, Big tech vendors will face the toughest regulation of online content since the arrival of GDPR.
The Digital Services Act (DSA) forces companies to more aggressively police digital content and protect online users from disinformation and hate speech or face heavy fines.
Technology law professor Suzanne Vergnolle said the DSA is part of a bigger strategy to give more power to individuals, to the regulators, to civil society.
“It is another step towards more accountability,” she told AFP.
Under the DSA, sites with at least 45 million active monthly users must obey more stringent rules, including annual compliance audits and a duty to counter disinformation effectively.
In April, the EU named 19 sites, including the Amazon Store, Apple’s AppStore, Google’s Play, Maps and Shopping, and clothing retailer Zalando, as well as the social media giants Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube and Twitter (now rebranded X) and the search engines from Google and Microsoft’s Bing.
Amazon and Zalando have filed legal challenges, claiming their platforms do not fit the criteria to fall foul of the first wave of regulation although observers think that this is a delaying tactic.
Industry commissioner Thierry Breton, the bloc’s top official for enforcing digital regulation, said companies “had now enough time to adapt their systems to their new obligations”.
“My services and I will thoroughly enforce the DSA, and fully use our new powers to investigate and sanction platforms where warranted,” he told AFP.
Facebook- and Instagram-owner Meta and TikTok announced in August steps they would take to comply, including giving European users more control over how they view content, with the option to opt out of recommendations based on profiling.
The EU will be looking mainly at X since billionaire Elon [look at me] Musk took over the Twitter platform last year, taking decisions over content that has provoked compliance concerns.
Breton has previously warned Musk that X needs enough resources to moderate dangerous content.
Google, meanwhile, says it has not waited for the DSA’s rules to apply, and has already implemented policies aimed at greater transparency and accountability.
Violating the rules could lead to fines of up to six per cent of a company’s global revenue, or even a ban.
If that were not enough of a headache for Big Tech, another EU law is coming.
Next month, the bloc will name which tech companies must obey tougher competition rules under the new Digital Markets Act (DMA).
In July, Brussels published a list of companies deemed to be “gatekeepers” including Amazon, Apple, TikTok’s owner ByteDance, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Samsung.
Such a status comes with extra rules that include preventing companies from controlling what apps are pre-installed on phones or from directing users to their products.
